Here’s the most recent image of my iPhone home screen as it continues to evolve. I think the most recent, previous image was this one.
Vs. the Old Screen
Instapaper is out. I still use it on the desktop sometime but, since I switched to Safari (yep), it has reading mode which is easy and basically does the same thing.
I really like Read Quick and I’m a fan of Clayton and Natalie Morris, at least when they’re on Twit.tv podcasts. It’s a neat idea and it actually works, but I just wasn’t using it. When I’m commuting (driving) and at other times I’m more often listening than reading. I just stopped using it very much.
The dreaded Facebook has arrived. Yeah. I finally decided to bite the bullet and try using Facebook for news as well as family goings on so I listened to Robert Scoble explain to Leo Laporte how to tune Facebook’s news feed, groups, etc. I’ve been using it since February.
I just removed Evernote and put Byword there a few minutes ago. I’m a fan of Evernote but they seem to be struggling (as the press puts it) and I decided it was a good time to move another one of my data sinks to the text-Markdown world. So now I write notes using Drafts, save them to Dropbox (where they are titled and formatted) and access them using various Markdown formatters. The formatter that allows both previewing the Markdown but also editing the notes within Dropbox is Byword. On the Mac desktop I use Marked for previewing and, of course, just Emacs in a terminal window to edit. This has been working surprisingly well. The only thing missing right now is that Byword doesn’t render included images. There are some competing standards between apps on how that’s done, i.e., how images are included. There is Multi-markdown and I think it has a standard way, but Byword doesn’t seem to use it. I’m not sure I’ve done all of the required homework on that one, though.
I still have my Evernote account and it’s still on my phone, but just not on the home screen. I also exported my notes and wrote an XML parser (well, I used the Python pre-existing XML library) to un-XML them.
Drafts is a wonderful app I’ve been using for a while. As everyone that talks about it says, it’s just for entering text. It opens super fast and it’s ready for you just to type. I have it set up to take notes and save them to Dropbox with the formatting described above. It’s where my notes went, even when I was using Evernote. From other apps’ Share sheets, I can send things to Drafts so it basically connects all of my apps together.
Finally, Safari. Chrome just keeps bloating in various ways and I heard that Safari handled battery life on the iPhone in a much better way. That makes sense. It seems secure enough (but note the most recent “pwn” (however you spell it) conference where Chrome withstood and Safari fell two or three times. I tried switching to Safari quite a few months ago, both on the phone and desktop, and I’ve been using it ever since. There are some Google apps that Chrome handles better, mainly their finance stock charts, but usually Safari is fine. Chrome is still on my phone and I still use it at work. I wouldn’t argue that Safari is better (except for the memory footprint, maybe faster and with better battery management where I would argue it’s better), but it’s seemed good enough so far.