Home Screens – Peter Vincent


This week’s home screen features reader and listener Peter Vincent. Peter is a smart guy and a chemist. He’s such a geek that he’s created a custom set of chemistry TextExpander snippets found over at Chem Expander (Twitter). So Peter, show us your home screen.


WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE APPS?

  • Sleep Cycle is the only way to get up in the morning. I don’t know how accurate its sleep tracking is, but its alarm function is amazing.
  • Plex is how I watch just about anything now, I have emptied both my MacBook and iPhone of all video content, and just stream it with plex.
  • Near Lock is a new app for me, but it is a great way of using Touch ID to unlock my MacBook, which I think is very cool.

WHICH APP IS YOUR GUILTY PLEASURE?

Overcast isn’t your typical guilty pleasure app. Except that in just over a year, I have saved 47 hours using the smart speed function. Do you know how many podcasts you need to listen to to save 47 hours with smart speed? you need to listen to a lot of podcasts to save 47 hours with smart speed.

WHAT APP MAKES YOU MOST PRODUCTIVE?

  • Wolfram Alpha is the reason I was able to pass calculus. When working and studying as an engineer, being able to instantly solve complicated functions with all sorts of units involved is an absolute life saver.
  • Scanbot is a little app that lets you take a photo of a document with your iPhone, and it returns a cropped OCR’ed and recoloured PDF in seconds.
  • Due is a very nice reminder app for anything that is time sensitive. Due will continue to nudge me after a task is due. This is something I do need if i want to do anything.

WHAT APP DO YOU KNOW YOU’RE UNDERUTILIZING?

  • Soulver is so cool, and the first ‘calculator’ app I have seen that does more than a pocket calculator can. I use it as a pocket calculator.
  • My Apple Notes only has 20 notes in it. Which I would have thought was fine, until I heard David Sparks has about 800 notes. So clearly I am under using Notes.

WHAT IS THE APP YOU ARE STILL MISSING?

There are so many clever people out there, that anything I could possibly think of seems to already exist. I don’t think I am even smart enough to come up with an idea for an app that I cant already buy for a few dollars. What a time to be alive!

HOW MANY TIMES A DAY DO YOU USE YOUR IPHONE/IPAD?

Almost constantly. I heard recently that the average iPhone user unlocks their phone 80 times a day. That just seems way to low… I wasn’t too bad when I owned the iPhone 5. Now I have a iPhone 6s Plus, I just can’t not use it. That huge screen is perfect for doing everything.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE FEATURE OF THE IPHONE?

Live Photos are so much fun, I love: – Taking a perfectly timed photo and getting that little bit of footage either side. – Catching someone saying something funny just as you take the photo. – Seeing a band live and getting a snap shot of their sound as well.

The vast majority of my photos I will remove the live function after the fact, but on the ones I keep are great. I feel like this is the future of photography.

IF YOU WERE IN CHARGE AT APPLE, WHAT WOULD YOU ADD OR CHANGE?

There are rumours that Apple will make MacOS to be a lot more similar to iOS. I think this is a mistake. I would embrace the differences between the two systems. Make mac better at what Mac can be good at, and make iOS better at what iOS can be good at. I would even break iOS up into iPhoneOS and iPadOS for the same reason.

WHAT’S YOUR WALLPAPER AND WHY?

My wallpaper is a live photo of my wonderful girlfriend. I love that you can set a live photo as a background. It’s just such a fun feature.

ANYTHING ELSE YOU’D LIKE TO SHARE?

I hate the camera on the 6s Plus. That’s not true at all, I love it and use it all the time. I love it so much that now I hardly use my DSLR (Canon 550D with a 24–105mm L Lens). My DSLR is obviously so much better than my iPhone, but the iPhone 6s Plus is finally good enough to make a DSLR not worth carrying around. I went to Banff in the Canadian Rockies in March to visit my brother. I only used my phone’s camera for the whole trip. If I had a lesser phone I would have used my DSLR and had even better photos.