The word iPhone is a misnomer. Calling an iPhone a phone is like calling a car an iCarRadio or a computer an iWebSurfer. The phone is just one of several things the iPhone does, and for me, only about 10% of what I use it for. This is how it gets away with not being a great phone. It’s just so useful for so many other purposes.
Over the course of a typical excursion across the city recently I used eight different apps without thinking about it. Not for the sake of using them, but because I had real problems to solve. The apps were: Google Maps with GPS to get me to the appointment, email to see if a friend responded to a coffee request, SMS to confirm, Yelp to find a coffee shop, phone to finalize, NYTimes, Facebook and Wikipedia to catch up on news while I waited, photo app to grab a snapshot of my friend. These were the scenarios we envisioned circa 2000 when I did some vision consulting with Palm. They have now become a reality in a sleek package.
I’ve ranted about the iPhone and criticized its inefficient UI and lack of needed buttons. It’s not the best phone in the world, but it is by far the best multi-purpose handheld computer and communicator. I even think it is worth the high monthly cost. But I can’t say for sure, because I can’t bear to look at the bill.
Recently I’ve been talking about the tools I use for interaction design and for general mac productivity. Now I’ll cover the tools I use on the iPhone.
The first page of the home screen contains my most frequently used apps. (Tip: press the physical home button in the home screen to get to the first page.) On the iPhone the focus of attention is really near the bottom of the screen, so the most used ones are actually at the bottom of this list.
iPod – (Now that I think about it, it doesn’t need to be here, since I can get to the iPod by double-pressing the Home button)- Settings – To turn wifi off when walking around the city. This is working around a design issue.
- App Store
- Safari
- Clock – for alarms & parking timers
- Zenbe lists – shared shopping list
- Google Maps
- NetNewsWire – Offline RSS reading. Syncs with my desktop RSS reader. Outstanding!)
- Facebook (which I think of as Headline News of your friends)
- NYTimes
- Google – Amaze your friends by speaking your query
- Wikipanion – surprisingly how often we reference things in casual conversation
- Say Who – voice dialing makes up for the sluggish performance of the iPhone on my 2,400 contacts
- OmniFocus (which I’m going to demote soon because by the time it’s launched, 2.5 minutes later (!) I’ve completely forgotten what i needed to record. I suggest you avoid this until they revamp their sync architecture and make launching instantaneous.)
In the grey bar, available on all pages of the home screen I have:
- Phone
- SMS/Text messages
- Camera
- Calendar
I sure wish I had physical buttons for accessing those items at any time, like the Palms!)
My page 2 apps include:
-
Pandora – The best music app on the iPhone. We plug it into our home sounds system and leave it on for hours. (I have AOL Radio and FlyCast next to them for coherence, but in my experience they have been flaky or commercial-laden or both.) - Instapaper – Click a single button on your PC’s web browser and the long article you don’t have a chance to read will be available on your iPhone, reformatted appropriately. Great app!
- Weather
- Stocks
- Twinkle – Twitter app. I may switch to Twittelator. (Follow me: @feign)
- Yelp – look up restaurants and stores
- MoMuni, so I know when the bus will come by
- Stanza – eBook reading. Excellent! Wish I had more time to use it. Reading prose on this small but hi-res screen really works
- My dreaded AT&T page, a Safari bookmark – so I can see if I’m going overboard in text messages, or just to feel bad
- Tip – restaurant tips
- Calculator
I have four more pages of apps I never look at.
iPhone apps are evolving faster than I can keep up. So please tell me what absolutely must-have apps there are that I missed.
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Philip Haine is a product designer and product vision specialist. He founded Obvious Design, LLC in San Francisco in 1997. His other blog on product vision can be found at ProductVision.org.
