This week’s home screen features Deron Bos (website) (Twitter). Deron is, among many things, a dad, a professional organizer, and a geek. I love how Deron is bringing his love of Apple technology to his business. So Deron, show us your home screen.

What are some of your favorite apps?

Tweetbot

I heard the deafening nerd chorus of praise for this app for years, but it wasn’t until I started tweeting for my business and learning that Twitter is at its best when interacting that I fell in love with Twitter. Even still, my sometimes dominating Dutch cheapness, had me on the official Twitter app for sometime before I ponied up. Now I love it – the swipe to reveal conversations I use constantly and all its satisfying robot sounds are music to my young-on-Twitter heart. I liked it so much that I eventually even bought the $20 Mac version. Totally worth it, look forward to the iPad update…coming soon?

Habit List

I found out about this from David’s Macworld review and knew it would be a good replacement for Good Habits which lacked a sexy iOS 7 design or more importantly the versatilely to schedule certain habits for certain days. I’m mostly using to try to keep myself accountable for networking/social media work for my business, but I’m thinking about moving my morning routine from Reminders to here as well. The one thing I wish it had was the ability to have folders or different contexts, so that “Fill up Buffer with week’s worth of posts” wouldn’t be right on top of “Make boys’ lunches.”

Pushpin

I teach digital organization to my clients, but like any good organizer I’m still figuring it out myself. I’m experimenting with Pinboard after feeling like links and web research would get lost in Evernote. Right now my digital buckets look something like: notes in Simplenote (NVALT on the Mac), long, sprawling, story like articles in Instapaper, scanned PDFs and cold storage in Evernote, more visual organizing links in Pinterest, videos in Pocket, and occasional recipes in Pepperplate. It seems a bit spread out to me at times, but the everything bucket model just hasn’t worked for me in the past.

Downcasts

Yes, its ugly and yes, I’m waiting to see what Overcast is like, and yes, I still can’t fully figure out its playlist feature, but it does stream episodes which for binge-listening a podcast like Fizzle (by recent Home Screen subject Chase Reeves) is key. MPU is heavy in my rotation too along with The Disney Story Origins Podcast and How Did This Get Made?

Reminders

I use lists with different contexts (Phone calls, Computer, Home, Errands, etc) for a very simple GTD system. It works fairly well – almost all the apps I love now have Mac counterparts like this one.

Messages

I love the multi-platform functionality of iMessages. Moving the same conversation from my iPhone to my full Mac keyboard is completely satisfying. Especially when it’s reminding my NYC friend of his perjorative views of turning 40 when he was 25.

Google Voice

This app has always been a bit crappy and it’s probably never going to be updated, but I use GV as my business line so it’s on the home page. I had hopes for GV, but I think it’s going to be integrated into Hangouts which I used the other day for the first time in a very long time and found very pleasing in its design.

Day One

This app knocks it out of the park – in all its versions. I love that it’s plain text, makes a great photo journal, and tags make it easy to place different content (food journal, movie review journal, journal-journal) in one place. An everything-journaling bucket that does work for me.

Reeder

This is one of the first iOS apps I truly loved and it’s still killer for me: pleasurable reading experience with a ton of options to send to the other buckets.

Lyft

I drive part-time for Lyft and the experience itself (rather than the app) of routing rides through Los Angeles with these things still we still call “phones” seems like a huge tip of the iceberg of how integrated technology is radically changing life. It’s continually surprising to me. Plus cute icons.

Waze

I’ve used Waze since it was one of the few free GPS iOS apps and I have to say it’s improved hugely in three years – it often does a very effective job of getting me around LA traffic through some untraditional routes.

Fantastical

Best calendar app, EV-AH.

Chrome

I’m somewhat surprised that I look like Mr. Google here, because I’ve never had any interest in Android, but there are some Google web apps that I’ve used for years fondly like Gmail and Google Docs (now Drive.) I switched to Chrome on my Mac because Safari was crashing so much on me, and it’s been much more stable, but I’m not sure I have the same need for Chrome on iOS. Mobile Safari is very fluid and I might switch back soon.

Gmail

I made the switch to Gmail focused apps after suffering through the Mail-Mavericks debacle and reading Macsparky’s convincing argument for embracing the Gmail apps that fully feature its uniqueness. Among them I like the divided inbox the most on mobile and the ease that it can handle my four (four?!) different Gmail accounts easily in one app. There are some things I miss in iOS Mail, not least of all the way it handles text.

What app is your guilty pleasure?

I don’t feel guilty about it, but an app I love for casual reading is Zite. I was bummed to find out that Flipboard bought it, because I always found much more superior and surprisingly personalized content on Zite.

If you were in charge at Apple, what would you add or change?

As the dad of two young boys, I still seeing having multiple user accounts on the iPad as low hanging fruit for the next version of iOS.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Thanks so much for asking – I think the home screens feature might have been how I found this blog originally so I feel honored to be featured.

Thanks Deron