Because all of the cool kids are doing it, here are my iPhone home screens…
Everyday
* PCalc – This is the best iPhone calculator for computery people.
* Google – While voice search is a little gimmicky, the search tool is awesomeness
* Clock – This wakes me up in the mornings and lets me know when tea is ready.
* CameraBag – This lets me take photos or alter existing photos in my library with artsy filters like Holga and Lomo.
* VNC – Invaluable if you have to administer or control multiple machines.
* DataCase – This is the closest thing I have to turning the phone into a USB keychain drive. When running, it opens your iPhone as a Windows share, FTP server, and HTTP server and you can set up various permissions (read-ony, read/write, dropbox.)
* Calendar, Mail, Photos, Camera, YouTube, Weather – Everyone gets these.
* Evernote – This is only the coolest notepad ever. It synchronizes with the desktop and web clients.
* Brightkite – They finally released a native client that does a pretty good job of figuring out what business you are at based on your GPS coordinates.
* Tweetie – The Twitter client du jour. Last week it was Tweetsville.
* Byline – I finally gave up NetNewsWire because I couldn’t use synchronize it at work (Linux.) After experimenting with Google Reader, thinking I’d hate it after a day, I’ve never looked back. Byline is a native iPhone client that syncs against Google Reader.
Geopositional/Local
* Maps – A killer mapping app from Google. It was made even more killer by the bus and walking directions.
* Google Earth – It’s gimmicky and fun to show off and that’s the only reason I have it.
* Geocaching – I have yet to visit a cache with the phone, but there’s one near work I want to try.
* GeopherLite – A simple GPS app.
* Yelp / Whrrl / Urbanspoon – Mainly used to find local restaurants and bars.
* iGasUp – Locates gas stations near you and displays their price (which is somehow obtained via credit card databases or somesuch as opposed to most gas price trackers that rely on good samaritans to infrequently update manually.) It has the unfortunate flaw of not actually listing the cheap station near home.
* Now Playing – Movie listings!
* PDXBus – Bus routes and schedules. It uses the GPS trackers on the busses themselves to let you know how long you have to wait for the next one.
* Trapster – This is a speed trap database. It pretty much relies on people posting trap info, and as such the quality of the listings is shaky at best.
* Mobile Fotos – It’s not 100% GPS-related. The main features are uploading and browsing Flickr through a slick iPhone-optimized interface, but it also lets you view photos taken near your current location.
* GeoHash – See also: xkcd
Games
* Sudoku – I play this all the time.
* Aki Mahjongg – Tile matching.
* Bejeweled 2 – I don’t play this as often as I used to.
* Dizzy Bee – You control this little bee disc that rolls around the screen like some kind of plinko ball and picks things up and avoids badguys.
* Enigmo – Build up contraptions that drip and collect water droplets.
* Toy Bot – Another tilt-based game where you control a little robot that started as a toy in a gumball machine.
* D-Mania – It’s like color and/or number matching on a 3D cube and rather difficult to describe.
* Mondo – A bazillion different variants of solitaire.
* Lumen – A lasers-and-mirrors-and-filters puzzle with downloadable levels.
* Spore – It’s the iPhone version of Spore. I hit a high level and haven’t been able to get past it, so consequently haven’t played in a while.
* Wurdle – It’s a grid of word tiles where you have to form words by traversing from tile to tile. I think it’s like Boggle?
* Adventure – Atari 2600!
* PuzzleManiak – A bunch of Open Source implementations of various puzzle games packaged as an iPhone game.
* WordWarp – An anagramming against a timer game.
* BattleAtSea – Battleship.
Other
* Pandora – If you don’t use Pandora, you’re missing out. A custom streaming radio station tailored to your very own tastes.
* pTerm – An SSH client for shelling into Unix boxes.
* SushiTime – A sushi translation and identification guide.
* USA Manual – Pretty much every founding document related to the US: Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constitution, Federalist Papers, Washington’s Farewell Address, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address, UN Charter, Censure of McCarthy, Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, Indian Bill of Rights, Patriot Act, list of presidents, details about states, and code related to the US Flag.
* WordPress – Blog authoring client
* ResistorCode – Surface mounts use numbers, but the older through-holes are color coded.
* Rooms – An IRC client.
* 1Password – Password and secure note storage.
* Facebook – Facebook client
* i.TV – TV listings, used to figure out when I should start looking for downloads of the upcoming episodes of my favorite shows.
* Ambiance – background noise
* Cocktails – A bartending guide
* Stanza – An electronic book reader. It is interesting and well-designed, but I don’t feel comfortable reading more than an article or short-story on the phone.
* Remote – Controlling iTunes remotely
* Snap – This is pretty much a scaled down version of nmap wrapped in a GUI. Locate machines on the LAN and see what services they are running.
Configuration
* iTunes, App Store, Settings, Calculator – They came with the phone
* AOL Radio – Kind of fun, but not as good as Pandora. It streams real radio stations with real ads.
* 2D Sense – for decoding those 2D barcodes
* World 9 – Using the motion sensors, it makes little Mario-collecting-a-coin sound every time you jump.
* PdaNet – Use the iPhone as a modem
* Cydia, Installer – Installing jailbroken apps. FYI: QuickPwn works on the 2.2 firmware.
* BossPrefs – I use this to enable and disable the SSH server in the phone. Considering it has a default root password, it’s rather dangerous to keep SSH running all of the time.
