Another year, another homescreen. As always, I have to thank MG for his timely annual reminder to do this. After almost a decide, I’m surprised that it’s not a habit by now.
There are a lot of changes this year. Except for the top 2 rows. Those are remaining the same. I use every app up there once a day. You’ll see 5-7 things missing or different. Why are some things missing?
Home / Sense are gone because I moved out of the home I own and into a rental and the home I own is no longer important when it comes to having smart home access. My rental forbids modifications like a solar panel, server rack, video doorbell or smart lock and why waste money on a rental so those apps are deprecated.
Deliveries, Halide, 1Password and SnowFlake are gone. The 1st three are just in a folder with SnowFlake removed after Carrot did a great redesign in 2022 and garnered my full weather attention. Deliveries is probably on its way out. They switched to a subscription model and at the same time, FedEx or UPS made it hard for them to do automatic updates to packages. I just don’t trust the app anymore so I’ve stopped using it in favor of dedicated UPS/FedEx apps that I don’t open but keep notifications enabled for. Each service has products that track inbound packages based on my mailing address. It works very well!
Halide I probably won’t use much any more. Apple’s Camera App is GREAT and RAW on the iPhone 14 in the camera app is really good and I use the RAW for a lot. I used it my entire honeymoon and at first glance, there are some photos on Flickr that look like they fit right in next to the images I shot on the Canon 5D. On my 32” display it’s night and day but Apple iPhone 14 + RAW is really compelling.
Motorcycle folder is on the 2nd screen because it’s winter and I’m not doing any long distance road trips.
In its place is a Credit Karma folder which is a bunch of apps I need for work, mostly Google ones. I’m not going to waste virtual ink on my thoughts on Google but that’s what this company uses to get work done and I’m falling in line.
Envoy (work access to our building), LinkedIN (I used this a lot in 2022 and probably should move it to a folder. TomTom Go and GoRide are both beta apps. As Apple Maps becomes more crappy (more on that in a future post and considers adding advertisements, I’m using TomTom’s automotive navigation app more. I’ve always preferred TT’s live traffic product and it integrates well with Apple CarPlay and will never have any ads. That’s HUGE. I was a part of the steering committee while at TomTom for the motorcycle specific app and so I’ve been using it a lot and LOVE it. It’s everything I want for a non-dirt-bike ride. I won’t use it for road trips but I will use it for after work or Saturday jaunts.
That’s the homescreen for 2023. I should demote LinkedIN and I should also start making an effort to fully move on from Apple Maps but I don’t anticipate much more changing in 2023. Thanks MG for the annual reminder!