This week’s home screen feature is by Allison Sheridan (twitter), a great friend and the host of the Nosillacast Podcast. Allison also lives in Southern California so we have travelled together to Macworld in the past. My favorite Allison story is how once we were talking about podcasts and I was sharing some of my favorite science and history podcasts with her. Allison looked at me completely deadpan and said, “I don’t listen to any of that stuff. For me, it’s all about the tech.” So let’s take a look at Allison’s home screen.

My most interesting home screen apps include:

11C Scientific
I think it’s fascinating that both Dave Hamilton and I have Reverse Polish Notation (RPN calculators on our home page! My preference is called 11C Scientific, and exact duplicate of the HP 11C calculator I’ve been carrying around since the 1970s.

DVR Remote
DVR Remote lets you type on a normal iPhone keyboard to enter the name of a show you’re trying to tell your TiVo to record. It’s so much fun to use I actually made a YouTube video showing how it works – it makes me giggle every time!

Zenbe Lists
I love Zenbe Lists. You see the iPhone app here but it’s also a website that syncs perfectly with the iPhone app. I make shopping lists, packing lists, Christmas lists, you name it, I put it all in Zenbe lists. I even made a separate Prism application for Zenbe so I can launch it in a snap on my Mac.

But my FAVORITE app is TimeScroller
TimeScroller is a must-have application if you like to, or have to hang out with people all over the globe. There’s no better way to keep track of what time it in different cities, figure out when you can all meet up, and in some cases figure out what day it is in another time zone. I used this constantly to play with my friends on the internets. There’s a Mac application too!

I do have a guilty pleasure and that’s Boomshine
It’s a very simple game, touch on the screen and put down a bubble that hopefully gets hit by the little colored dots floating around, the more you hit before your bubble goes away, the more points you get. I’m pretty sure there is no skill involved at all here but for some reason it makes you think you’re developing a strategy!

You’ll notice I use Simply Tweet as my Twitter client and I like it well enough but the one app I still haven’t found on the iPhone (or the Mac for that matter) that lets me create groups to follow on a separate screen. I follow a lot of people (around 400) so my feed is always interesting but I’d sure like to be able to flip to a group of just my family, or just my podcasting buddies (like MacSparky) and make sure I never miss their tweets. Nambu on the Mac got close but it was buggy and crashed on me whenever I did a direct tweet. Might need to go back and revisit that app since I haven’t tested in a long time. But if anyone knows of an iPhone app that will do groups for me I’d be most appreciative to hear about it!

I use my iPhone pretty much constantly, taking maybe 15 minute breaks from it – but oddly the thing I use the very least is the phone! I’m not saying I don’t appreciate having a phone around from time to time but if I had to give up one thing on my iPhone it would probably be the phone!

Thanks Allison!