My First & 20

I first did this post back in October 2009 on my Tumblr account. Think its time for an update as 8 months is a long time between drinks.

In case you didn’t know, First & 20 is a website which hosts “a collection of iPhone Home Screens from some very talented designers, developers and tech writers”. If you are one of those people that are constantly asking other iPhone users “what app are you using?”, then you would love this site. Thing is, I’m not a very talented designer, developer or tech writer; so that led me to write up My Own First & 20 Tumblr post about it. Since then, I think I’ve fine tuned my use of apps on the iPhone enough to warrant a review of this post. Here are my featured apps and why.

My First & 20

I’m still an addicted Twitter user with four our of the six 3rd party apps here Twitter-related. Most of the official Apple apps I find very useful like Safari, Mail & Phone/Messages (Duh! It’s still a phone). A couple of 3rd party apps I featured in my Tumblr post were moved to other pages as I didn’t find them that necessary to be at the front anymore. The remaining ones are:

Foursquare [Location-based Social Networking] – Use this mainly on weekends when going out and to keep track of where friends have checked in. As if following them on Twitter isn’t stalkish enough.

Facebook [Social Networking] – I did a cull of my Facebook “friends” from 450 contacts down to 130 since my Tumblr post. This makes using this app so much better with less clutter & crap.

Twitter for iPhone [Twitter] – I’ve been juggling between this and Twitterrific for ages. Each have got their distinct pros which lead me to swapping between the two. So far Twitter is the best, but even after Twitter’s acquisition of atebits’ Tweetie, it’s still not 100% perfect to me. We’ll see how good Twitterrific 3 is soon.

Birdbrain [Twitter] – Possibly the only app that keeps track of my Twitter followers, retweets and faves; as well as doing a great job at it.

Birdhouse [Twitter] – This app is getting old and it’s functions are outdone by Twitter for iPhone, but it’s still good to draft tweets without requiring an internet connection.

Chirpy [Twitter] – This is a fairly new app that I’m using. It does Direct Messages on Twitter like SMS conversations, so it’s useful to keep track of private convos. I know other clients do the same thing, but this is a dedicated app just for doing this without opening my main Twitter client.

I’ll make this post a little bit more interesting and show you the second page of my iPhone.

My Second & 20

I won’t go into each app in detail, but contact me if you want to know more about each one. There’s a third page as well, however, it only consists of a folder with the remaining official Apple apps (e.g. iTunes, App Store, Compass, YouTube, etc.) which I rarely use/don’t want in my main screens, as well as TextExpander and either Tweet Push/Boxcar/iTweetReply (Twitter push notification apps) running in the background. I’m pretty picky with Twitter push notification apps; worse than with actual Twitter clients.

Dude, where are your games?

Yeah, I’m a bit weird like that. I buy, download and play the occasional game on the iPhone but once I finish (or get bored of) it, I just remove it. Don’t get me wrong, I love iPhone games, but I find myself spending more time on news feeds or Twitter than playing games during my “down time” (i.e. toilet). I’m finding though, that my iPad is taking up most of my game playing now.

I’m keen to know what your First & 20 apps are. Let me know in the comments, contact me or tweet me. Expect a similar post on the iPad in the next few months.