In our most recent Mac Power Users episode, Katie and I talked about our home screens. At the end I convinced Katie to share her iPad home screen at MacSparky and here it is. One of the highlights of my life is taking time every week to make the Mac Power Users with Katie Floyd (website) (Twitter). So Katie, show us your home screen.
What are some of favorite apps?
I have a common morning routine with the iPad. I’ll check email using Apple’s Mail.app, review my RSS feeds with Mr. Reeder and check Twitter using Tweetbot all before I get out of bed. As time allows I’ll also check in with the Mac Power Users Community on Google Plus and maybe catch up on a few items I’ve saved to my Instapaper queue.
For work and school related projects I live by apps like OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, PDFpen and Evernote. As we discussed on the Mac Power Users Tech in Education episode, I keep all my notes in OmniOutliner and supporting material is either in Dropbox or Evernote. Most of these documents are PDFs which I read and annotate using PDFpen. The beauty of this workflow is thanks to various sync services everything is available on any of my Macs or on the iPad.
Which app is your guilty pleasure?
I’ve never been a gamer so I don’t have a single game on my iPhone or iPad. So I guess if I had to pick a “guilty pleasure” it would have to be a social media related App like Tweetbot or Facebook. I seldom post to Facebook but do like it for keeping up with old friends. I love interacting with friends and followers through Twitter.
What is the app you are still missing?
I’m still missing a really great App for taking notes. Notability is probably the best but the dream is to be able to take notes on the iPad as easily and clearly as I do on a pad of paper. Unfortunately my handwriting has never been the best and even with fancy stylus like the Evernote Jot Script writing on the iPad is still a struggle. The text is barley legible, input is dropped, and despite wrist protection features I still end up with stray marks all over the page. For now, typing using the iPad’s built in keyboard is still a far better, but a less than optimal, option for me.
How many times a day do you use your iPad?
My iPad the first thing I reach for in the morning and the last thing I put down at night. While I don’t take it with me every day, since converting to the iPad mini last year I’ll take my iPad out and about with me many days for use when taking notes at meetings, reading (especially reading and highlighting cases for class) and doing more productive work on the go.
What Today View widgets are you using and why?
The trick to Today View widgets is to have enough to be useful, but not too many that it becomes overly cluttered. On the iPad I use fewer than on the iPhone. I use Dark Sky because it’s one of the smallest forecast widgets I’ve seen and it’s very accurate. Although the Fantastical widget takes up quite a bit of space, it’s a great at-a-glance view of my calendar and I can easily create new events from the widget. I use the Evernote widget because it gives easy access to creating a new document . The Drafts widget allows me to easily send information from the clipboard to Drafts, though as of this writing the fate of that widget is in flux.
On my iPhone I use additional widgets including OmniFocus and Delivery Status and DataMan.
What is your favorite feature of the iPhone/iPad?
Even after all these years with the iPad every time I pick it up I still feel a little bit in awe. I have an object in my hand that’s smaller than a pad of paper and it’s a computer. How freaking cool is that? Steve Jobs was right, the iPad was and remains a magical and revolutionary device.
If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?
I would continue to open up iOS. Apple has made great progress with a limited set of extensions in iOS 8 and developers have used those tools to do great things. 1Password is now available in Safari and can be unlocked with my thumb, I can share items directly into Evernote, Instapaper a
nd OmniFocus and my TextExpander snippets are now available everywhere thanks to a custom keyboard. While these are among my favorite new features, but there’s still so much more we could do. Why are there no share extensions in Mail.app? What about giving developers access to Siri? Why are there so many seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what can occur in the Today View Widgets? Why can’t I customize Control Center? I understand Apple has to balance stability and security with usability and features but I feel there’s still more work to be done here.
What’s your wallpaper and why?
It’s a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge taken from a boat in the bay. I took the photo during my first trip to Macworld in January of 2008. I think it’s a nice photo but it’s also sentimental because it represents so many things; my first Macworld, the trip where I first met David and so many people who would become great friends, it’s also the trip that was the genesis for Mac Power Users.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Life for me has been pretty crazy the past few months but I feel like I am starting to find a balance. I’m making a conscious effort to keep my blog regularly updated, even if it’s smaller posts, and I’m trying to engage more on social media. I’d love a few more subscribers over at katiefloyd.me and followers on Twitter @katiefloyd.
Thanks Katie.