Home Screens: Maury Hill


This week’s home screen features Maury Hill (Twitter). Maury spends most of his time developing CRM tools for Windows at MetaStock but also happens to be a big Mac nerd. As Maury explained to me, he does Windows development from his retina MacBook and iOS devices via Jump Desktop. Go Maury! So, show us your home screen.


What are some of your favorite apps?

OmniFocusDrafts, and iThoughts. My brain could not relax without the ability to get things off my mind, view them when necessary, and just plain lay things out before my eyes. I also love using Overcast to discover all things Apple from MPU

I have to mention Due and the harassment it delivers, helping me to get the easy to ignore, day to day things done. What would I do if I forgot my pills or laundry?

I also have to confess I’m having an affair with Siri. I talk to it all day long on all of my devices, including the Watch. 

Which app is your guilty pleasure?

TweetBot and Reeder. I spend far too much time in these apps. Reeder is essential to stay up to date, but Tweetbot lets me peer into the lives of other geeks like me. I can also complain to app developers. 

Honestly, I wish there were Desert Golf scholarships when I went to school. I just need to delete that app. 

What app makes you most productive?

This is on the verge of becoming an OmniFocus review. I have to get things off my mind to stop thinking about them. Along with Siri, this app makes it easy. OmniFocus shows me tasks when I need to see them and thanks to Review mode, which I have never found in similar apps, I can prioritize projects and focus on what’s important now. 

Continuing to regurgitate others’ posts, Drafts is also wonderful. I love it’s widget, which allows me to dump the clipboard into a new draft and use it in searches or even for processing queries in DropBox files by one of my SQL Servers, returning query results, opened via its widget. I use Hygia to accomplish that. It is “Hazel” for Windows. 

The Apple Watch helps me stay off my phone and focus on what I should be doing, which is writing more bugs. 

What app do you know you’re underutilizing?

WorkflowHazel, and Editorial. I read so much about these from MacSparky, MacDrifter, and Viticci, but I just never find the time to explore them. I think the fault rests on the shoulders of the awesome newborn boy my wife and I adopted last year. 🙂 [That’s a pretty good reasy Maury. -Sparky]

What is the app you are still missing?

Not an app, but more Siri integration. I would like VoiceOver to be more reliable for reading out notifications, and I would love to tell Overcast to play specific podcasts, or have Workflow run specific tasks with my voice. 

How many times a day do you use your iPhone?

My wife could give you an exact count. I don’t think the phone leaves my hand. I’m definitely an addict in need of a disconnect.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

I heard somewhere that only 20% of the features you release are used by 80% of your users. It certainly is true of the fruits of my code, so I cannot blame Apple for not adding “power user” features. But I wouldn’t mind if the track pad feature for the iPad came back for the iPhone and if Hey Siri were accessible even when not on power. 

I’m a grown up Apple. Let me drain my battery at light speed and fumble the cursor around. Just have a setting to disable it for everyone else!

Thanks Maury.