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I’m going to walk you through my home screen. I’ll start from a high level and then zoom in on each of my folders in future posts.

For this post I’ll focus on all the apps that are launchable (one touch away).

So here it is.

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Home Screen

I have only 8 apps that can be launched quickly (9 including settings). The reason I’ve chosen these is because for a phone these are the things I do most often.

  • Email
  • Contacs
  • Calendar
  • Reminders
  • Phone
  • SMS or iMessage
  • Password retrieval
  • Internet Browsing

I’ll write a blog post for each app and explain why I’ve chosen these over Apples built in apps and how to configure them to use Google goodness soon. But until then if you want to install them yourself here are the all important links.

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Gmail. I use Googles as my email provider. I requested an account when they first went public back in 2005 with a massive 1GB of storage, and haven’t looked back.

Now it is possible to use Apples mail app to almost do things you want, move to a folder is similar to labelling and archiving. However there are other advantages to using Googles
App that I’ll go in to later in my Gmail post.

I will say I’ve only just made the switch, and Apples mail might win me back if bugs and things become too much pain.

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I found Groups when I was faced with a very specific challenge. My wife and are were going to have a baby and we wanted a way to text and email whole groups of people quickly.

Looking for contacts apps that did this lead me to Groups. It’s now replaced the built in contacts app for me.

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Thank you Life Hacker. I’m always looking for quicker, better, easier ways to do things. Life Hacker wrote an article on Calvetica and i fell in love with the design. After using it for a couple of days I then fell in love with the features.

The best feature, it uses google calendar.

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This was a no brainer. I’d moved to the Mac in 2008 and needed a replacement password manager. 1password might be expensive, but the Mac and iPhone integration (via dropbox) means I had no choice.

It’s down next to Safari (I have tried other browsers but none have beaten it yet) because I want quick access to my passwords when switching from Apps that need them. Which is normally Safari.