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iPhone Application Addictions, er, Additions

Mar 7, ’09 12:51 AM

A little lighter fare for this weekend. For people like me who are into their mobile devices, their selection of apps reveals a bit about their personality. I used to get excited to try out new apps, which come out daily. But now, figuring out what screen to put them on stresses me out!

There are now over 25,000 iPhone apps available in the iTunes Store but the iPhone has slots for 148 applications, or 9 screens full of apps. Even if you bought all 25,000 at a cost of US$71,442, many are pointless (Bubblewrap anyone?) And until Apple provides an easy way to manage them, except manually dragging icons around from screen to screen, I’ve become less inclined to experiment with potentially time-sucking apps. Of the 7 screens of apps I have, I’d say screen 2 is by far the most heavily used one. I think I use most of these everyday and some several times a day. My recent post on juggling priorities and availability of various applications on the iPhone help narrow things down to just the essentials above.

Looking at my most heavily used screen, the top row shows that I am a news junkie. Yup, guilty as charged. You might wonder why I have both the NY Times and USA Today apps  and for good reason. The NY Times app until very recently, was pretty crappy and unreliable so I used USA Today as it is much stabler and faster. Plus it has more sharing features, like sending URL’s to text messages or Twitter.

Row 2 tells you that I’m rather food-obsessed with 4 dining apps in the second row, but these are just the tip of the iceberg! I have a whole other screen chock-full of other food-related apps, including one specifically for espresso drinks! OK, enough about that.

The third row is where things get ultra practical — subway schedule/map, flight tracking tool, note taking app and weather. Row 4 is about socializing, from instant messaging to microblogging to full-on blogging. You know, gotta have various ways to kill time in airports, traffic or boring meetings. Not like that ever happens to you now, does it? Maybe I should use that time to figure out what applications to download next.

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Juggling Priorities: Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS

Mar 6, ’09 12:01 AM

As information sources become more and more numerous, it’s becoming more and more challenging staying on top of things. When I was a kid, my dad would grab the morning paper and he’d read the headlines while I grabbed the sports section for the box scores. And that’s all I had to do before heading off to class. Fast forward to the present and there’s so much more to catch up on these days and I’ve jiggered up my morning routine now:

Email > Twitter > Facebook > Breakfast > RSS (on the go)

A few years ago, my email was the last thing I looked at before going to bed and the first thing I did when I woke up, often during breakfast. Fast forward to the present and now a bunch of “news” compete for my attention: email, RSS feeds, news sites, Twitter and Facebook updates and so on. Because the time-space continuum isn’t changing and I still need to rush out the door to work, there’s less and less time to cram all of this reading in.

As a result, the stuff that I actually read becomes shorter and shorter. While email is still my top priority as it probably is for many others, my priorities have shifted. I find I am more efficient when I compartmentalize my attention. It used to be that I’d login to Facebook on my computer but now, I simply scan status updates on my mobile. I used to catch up on RSS feeds through Google Reader, but now, I refresh them on the mobile and read them cached on the train to work. Most recently, I’m finding Twitter gaining in the attention competition. If one is judicious about who to follow, I believe it’s possible to get a timely pulse of what’s going on at a glance because the 140 character limit enforces efficiency and blends nicely with my morning caffeine spike. I am sure a couple of years from now, there will be something new that will shake things up.

What does your morning routine look like today?

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