Homescreens for iPhone, iPad and OS X: November 2012

The way I organized the my OS X Home screen is the guideline for all the other devices in the system. I easily access the launchpad with a click of a mouse button. I am primarily using launch bar to access all of the apps, and similar stuff, but I like visual clean design of launch pad, where I have the apps matching my iOS devices. It creates certain level of familiarty, and is already deeply ingrained in my muscle memory. So here’s the first home screen.

Mountain Lion Setup

Row 1

The most obvious icon is the date. As I tend to be in the full screen mode often, it tends to hide my date, and I like to have the classic iCal icon showcased. I don’t actually use iCal, I use Fantastical (review coming up), but I am in love with iCal icon. Omnifocus is an obviously the most important part of my ecosystem, followed by my Elephant like storage, called Evernote. nvALT and Byword are right by each other, displaying the main focus of my efforts. There is also DayOne, as my default journaling application. Pomodorable is the odd app in here, as I am testing it out lately.

Row 2

This row starts with iWork apps. Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Lately, I’ve been using heavily these three apps. Pages for preparing material for print, and keeping a couple of my documents that I like keeping in beautiful design of the Apple’s word processing app. Numbers has been a safe harbor for tracking my expenses and Keynote for some presentations that I’ve been holding in the company. I use these exclusively with Dropbox. Skitch is my default screen clipper, and I like to have it readily available on Launch Pad for the purpose of looking pretty and matching my iOS devices. Sometimes I will access some of my previous clippings as they are stored directly in the app. I don’t use messages as often, because sometimes they disturb my workflow. But when I know I am caught up in the longer chat with someone, I will get in Messages, and continue from there. iPhoto to access my galleries and Settings I don’t access through LaunchPad, but I like the visual appeal of it. Plus this way it matches my iOS counterparts.

Dock

In order to preserve stickiness, and to fight some differences in the platforms, I used the dock to be custom tailored per device. Scrivener is down here, along with the Safari, iTunes, Postbox and Hootsuite (built from Fluid). In the right part, you can find Download folder, Most Recent folder and my most important document that I am reading daily.

iPad Setup

Springboard apps for iPad

Now I won’t get into the details with the iPad setup, as you may have noticed, most of the applications are being repeated, with the exception of Pomodorable, which is OS X only. Everything else is pretty much the same, except it’s divided into 3 rows. This way, it is made so it is more similar to the OS X. But in the vertical mode, most of the apps, are exactly as they are on the iPhone:

Now the difference in the dock with iPad comes with two Folders, that I access frequently on iPad. As iPad is my “go to entertainment” device, I like to have my social media accounts assembled in one place, so I go in there and check them 1 by 1. My most important activity on the iPad is reading, hence there is the “Read” folder in there, right next to the Newsstand. As writing is my favorite activitity, I left the Drafts, as the constant reminder, to what’s important regardless of the device.

iPhone setup

iPhone Homescreen setup

And this goes on my iPhone. This way I wanted to createa as consistent as possible working environment. Since iPhone has the smallest dock, I attached Launch Center Pro, to cover whatever I was lacking in comparison to iPad and OS X.

Your turn?

What apps do you have on your home screen?