iPhone: Winter 2022
Here’s my iPhone Home Screen layout and the apps I’m using for Winter, 2022.
Home Screens hint at their owners' interests, priorities, and values; I love seeing other people's Home Screens and getting a peek at the apps they use & how they organize the space most people spend at least 2+ hours around each day.
Here is a look at my Home Screen as of December 2022 - from the apps I use to a little bit about why I organize things the way I have.
LockScreen
My Lock Screen features a yet-unreleased version of my iPhone 14 Pro Schematic in a new colorway with the activity, battery, and weather widget displayed.
My 'True' Home Screen
The first page of my home screen is all Apple apps. Although I use all of the apps on this home screen daily, keeping Apple apps separated from third-party apps is a legacy habit I've hung onto. I like the look of my all Apple Home Screen quite a bit, and I justify my stubbornness against incorporating third-party apps because I still use all of these Apple apps quite regularly.
My first page consists of two small widget panels that rotate between Weather on the left (current & 4-day forecast via CARROT) and Fitness, Calendar month-view, Fantastical, & Sleep on the right.
Below my widgets are the 14 most used Apple apps: Calendar, Mail, Photos, Camera, Weather, Notes, Reminders, Freeform, Books, App Store, Podcasts, Fitness, News, & Settings. There's also a folder on my Home Screen with all the other Apple apps that I use regularly but less frequently.
My Home Screen
But as basic as I am, you're not reading this, and I'm not writing this to share my all-Apple Home Screen. My second page features all the other apps I use daily. I keep every non-Apple app on this Home Screen and try to maintain as few apps as are essential on my device. That number (Apple & third party apps) currently sits at 79 (which honestly feels like several dozen too many).
I keep apps I love using and those I use most regularly on my Home Screen. Apps like Apollo and Things fall primarily into the Love category, while apps like Lose It! remain on the Home Screen to prompt me to use them. Anything not on this Home Screen is either deleted or relegated to one of three folders: Photo, Utilities I, or Utilities II. I don't keep any apps inside my App Library that I don't have on this Home Screen. The Photo folder holds all of the design/photography apps I use on my iPhone, and Utilities I contains the nine critical apps I access less regularly and thus don't need prominence on the Home Screen. The Utilities II Folder holds a collection of apps I either don't mind having installed but use less frequently to apps I wish I could get rid of but keep installed for one reason or another.
Finally, I like my Home Screen to pop. It is bright and colourful & filled with my favourite apps. I want this page to give good vibes. I am also a huge fan of alternate app icons, with 8 of the 11 icons that offer customization using an alternate icon. This is an easy way to refresh my Home Screen without swapping apps and can provide variety if the Home Screen starts looking too monochrome.
Things: Things by Cultured Code has always been a mainstay on my Home Screen going back to July 2008 and the launch of the App Store. It has remained at the top left of my Home Screen for years because of how important it's been in helping me stay organized.
Tot: Tot by The Iconfactory has been an indispensable lil' application for collecting little snippets of data. It's beautifully simple and uncluttered - it does one thing, but it does it exceptionally well. I have the application across all my devices and use it (primarily via the Share Sheet) to collect links and sections of text that I want to remember. Also, I love the icon.
CARROT Weather: CARROT Weather by Brian Mueller is another app that has been a mainstay on my Home Screen for years. The degree of customization, breadth of notifications, and insights about future weather have been essential for helping plan around Canada's ever-unpredictable weather. As a bonus, the savage sarcasm this app provides always helps keep my self-esteem in check.
Photo Folder: This folder holds Darkroom, Pixelmator Photo, Instagram, Halide, Pixelmator, Linea Sketch, Facetune, & Lightleap.
Apollo: Right below the application (i.e. Things) that keeps me productive is Apollo for Reddit by Christian Selig, the app that is perhaps guilty of making me the least productive. I have been a massive fan of Apollo for years, and the app has become the only way I can stand to browse/post on Reddit anymore. It's brilliantly designed, powerful, offers oodles of customization, and is far more responsive & intuitive than the official Reddit app. Made in Canada too!
Day One: Day One by Bloom Built, Inc. & Automattic is the most precious app on my Home Screen. I have been journaling since I was a child and have amassed over 6,400 entries inside Day One. I keep several different journals, including Places for memorable spots I have enjoyed visiting, Topics for more long-form entries, and Daily, which has over 5000+ entries ranging from the events of the day to the meal I prepared on April 14, 2021 (tacos, if you're interested). Accompanying most entries are also 1-2 photos to capture the mood of the day - whether of my dog, a beautiful sunset, or the night 300 crows flew over our home.
Lose It: Lose It! remains on my Home Screen to remind me to take a few moments each day to capture the food and nutrition I am consuming. This app has helped me achieve more awareness about my eating habits by helping me be more mindful about snacking and make better choices to improve my diet.
Utilities I Folder: Consists of my lesser-used but critical applications. These include:
Sportsnet: For watching any sports-related content, primarily hockey.
Amazon: For shopping.
Parcel: For tracking packages (with the best Amazon Integration of any tracking app).
Agenda: Exclusively used as a planning pad for things related to my Twitter, blog, etc. Agenda track projects and ideas for all things Basic Apple Guy related.
RBC Mobile: Money stuff.
Mastodon: My escape pod should this whole Twitter thing go down. You can find me at: @BasicAppleGuy
Twitterrific: For a clean and straightforward ad-free Twitter feed.
Tripsy: An app my spouse and I use for planning and organizing our upcoming trips - including landmarks, favourite restaurants, cafes, flight and transit tracking, etc.
Audible: Audiobook player with nearly 300 books listened to over the years.
Tasks: Tasks by Mustafa Yusuf is a to-do List and Kanban application that I recently added to my Home Screen. I don't want to have my life scattered across multiple to-do apps, but I've been eyeballing this app for some time and am particularly fond of its Kanban approach of delegating in-progress tasks. Too early to tell if I'll migrate from Things, but it's a promising app.
Twitter: As far as my vices and distractions go, when I'm not down some subreddit rabbit hole in Apollo I am probably inside Twitter. I use the official app because I am okay with the algorithmic feed for pulling up tweets I may have missed, the bookmarking & search tools it offers, and the ability to edit tweets. I keep Twitterrific inside my 'Utilities I' folder for a cleaner, ad-free feed as needed.
Up Ahead: Up Ahead by Dan Gauthier is a beautiful and positively delightful way of tracking & counting down to the important moments in your life. I've tried many countdown apps that are either clunky, ugly, or primarily focused on widget creation. In contrast, Up Ahead is intuitive, beautiful, and has a fantastic app experience and widget support. It has also changed my relationship with events, helping me visualize and see the connections between the things I found important at the time.
Utilities II Folder: A hodgepodge collection of apps that I use less regularly but enjoy having on my device or that I feel compelled to hang onto for one reason or another.
Apps I use less regularly but enjoy:
Craft: Used as an archive for all my Basic Apple Guy blog posts.
Fantastical: I don't use Fantastical as my principal calendaring application, but I adore its widgets too much to forfeit the app.
MoneyWiz: For tracking my budgets and finances.
Dice by PCalc: Primarily used to decide if we want Chinese (heads) or Pizza (tails) for supper.
PCalc: The best Calculator/conversion app going since 1992. If you don't use PCalc, you're making life harder for yourself.
iA Writer: Any post I write for the blog begins in iA writer. While I primarily use it on my iPad & Mac, it's my markdown app of choice, and I like to keep it on my iPhone to have my in-progress work synced between devices.
Calm: More soundscapes, meditations, sleep stories, and music.
NordVPN: My current VPN client.
Flight Board: I am an aviation nut. The only reason I own an Xbox is for Flight Simulator. I enjoy having an app that shows flights and destinations from around the world.
Paper Wizard: Remember when Apple released a Warren Buffett-inspired newspaper tossing game and pulled it 2 days later? Yeah. I still have that app.
Bandbreite: For tracking my Apple Watch band collection.
Facades: Michael Steeber's Facades App is on my device to give me information about the history of all things Apple Store related.
Apps I keep but wish I could get rid of:
Costco: For my Costco Membership eCard
Health Mate: for tracking weight via my Withings scale.
Cellphone & Flight apps: For managing my cellphone bill and flight bookings.
Coinbase: For the few crypto-related things I still naively hold onto.
Sofa: Sofa by Shawn Hickman is a relatively new app on my Home Screen, and it is on a Home Screen probationary period. Sofa markets itself as a 'downtime organizer,' as we're all probably inundated with suggestions and recommendations for stuff to view, watch, read, or listen to, Sofa provides an excellent central location to keep that organized. Previously I would save my recommendations in a Note, but I am digging some of the additional metadata, and organizational tools Sofa provides.
NHL: This is installed by default on every iPhone sold in Canada. It's not, that's a joke, but hockey is life. I use the app to get notifications and check in-game scores.
Reeder: Reeder by Silvio Rizzi is the most beautiful & powerful feed managers/readers out there. I'm never wrestling with the app to view content, and it's effortless to send feeds and articles via the Share Sheet into the app for offline viewing. If I'm not inside the News app, I am inside Reeder.
Flighty: Flighty is a small crew of 3 led by Ryan Jones and is perhaps the most meticulously designed and beautiful app on the App Store. Whereas Things is obsessively designed to track, well, things; Flighty is obsessively designed to track flights. And it's fantastic at it, to the point that I use it exclusively over airline apps because it's often faster at giving me critical gate-change/flight delay notifications. I trust Flighty, and it's earned that trust across dozens of flights it has helped me track over the years.
Endel: I've raved about Endel for years as an application that can generate infinite & personalized ambient soundscapes. Endel has been my go-to app when I need to buckle down and focus. It's also our most frequently used playlist before bed - piped through our bedroom HomePod the hour or so before the missus & I head to sleep. The new Rainy Outside & Spatial Orbit soundscapes are recent favourites, while the Relax, Sleep, & Focus are our longtime goto tracks.
Portal: Portal founded by Nick Daniels is a new app on my Home Screen under a probationary period like Sofa & Tasks to see how I incorporate it. It's an incredibly well-designed, beautiful-looking soundscape app that captures the essence of some of the most incredible locations on earth in beautiful and dynamic spatial audio. And with the ability to pair your smart lighting to the app, Portal is about as immersive an experience as you can get without actually going to these locales.
stoic.: Wait... so you have two journal apps, two Twitter apps, two to-do apps, and two ambient apps on ONE Home Screen? Like Tasks & Portal, Stoic is fighting for a spot trying to dethrone my longtime staple, Day One. It's a minimal writing/journalling app that does a superb job helping you gain insight into the relationship between your moods & events, with thoughtful prompts that help you reflect on how areas of life (work, family, alone time, nature) affect your well-being. If you want a more structured, process-based journalling experience, I recommend trying Stoic.
Mini Metro: Mini Metro by Dinosaur Polo Club tasks players to construct a transit network across various cities across the world. The game has a clean & elegant design reminiscent of iconic transit maps and a simple concept that becomes progressively more challenging the more you play. Think your city's transit system sucks? Could you do a better job? Take Mini Metro for a spin.
1Password: Passwords, licence keys, and important documents are all stored inside 1Password. The added ability to create vaults for family members to access important documents and logins has also been indispensable.
Let me know your thoughts, and connect with me about the apps you use. See an app you like? Let me know what your experience with it has been. Have a beautiful app that has made a meaningful impact on you? Let me know about it!
