Every morning on the bus I'm still amazed at how much stuff is packed into this little pocket computer - the iPhone 4 in this case. I seem to have created myself a little routine for each morning - strategically shaped around signal strength and how long I've got to get stuff done so I thought I'd share it...
When I walk out the door in the morning I have about a 5 minute walk up to the bus. I'm not tragic enough to be (immediately) staring at my phone & running into people, so I fire up the ABC iPhone App (above) and listen to some live News Radio to ease into it. Sometimes on the way home I'll watch some of their live News 24 video stream on the bus - which works incredibly well. The only downside to the app is you have to have it open to stream. Yeah, ok, makes sense for video, but I'd like to be able to listen to the news and open the twitter app at the same time. I imagine they'll probably update it at some point to take advantage of the multitasking feature introduced in iOS 4.
When I jump on the bus I have about 5-10 minutes before I switch to the train. I have a 3G signal on the bus so I go about collecting some stuff to read on the train. (Telstra 3G works at all the underground station platforms but drops out in most tunnels). So, I then hit the Twitter App (below) and check out what is happening.
A lot of people from overseas that I'm following have been awake while we're asleep, and everyone here is now up and about so there's normally loads to catch up on. If I see something mentioned that I want to check out, I do 1 of 2 things...
- if it sounds like it's a big photo gallery or a video (and I'm keen to check it on my desktop mac when I get to the office) I'll swipe & mark it as a favourite it in the Twitter app - and then just pull up my favourites in my desktop Twitter app at work. Prob not the intended use, but works for me nicely.
- if it sounds like a straight article or tutorial, I'll swipe and hit the paperclip icon (reveals sharing options for links within a tweet) and select 'read later' - which feeds it into the Instapaper App. Instapaper magically (the next time it's opened) sucks in those articles, strips out all the formatting, text & ads (ga$p) and keeps it local on your phone (no 3G signal needed) to (makes sense now) read later.
As I'm getting off the bus I open Instapaper and all those articles I wanted to read are cued up, ready for the 2 trains I need to catch. It's very clever and keeps images that were within the body of the article inline and scales them down to fit the screen (below). All other images outside of the article body get ditched though. Sometimes I'll be able to get through about 8-10 articles or tutorials just on the train, which is a splendid use of down time as far as I'm concerned. In the afternoon it's twice as good because I no longer read MX.
Towards the end of the train trip I'll normally start taking a few pics with my phone. I try to get at least 1 sydney morning photo each day. I'm not big on the photo apps that heavily lay on the effects. For the morning pic I tend to use 1x1 Camera which takes square photos - that's it (below). I then run the pic through the Tiltshift Generator app but just to make it black & white or adjust the contrast a bit (you can avoid the blurring 'feature' by dragging out the nonblur area wider than your photo, so none of it is effected).
I normally take a bunch of pics, and upload them all to Flickr using Mobile Fotos but leave them marked as private. When I get to the office I check which one looks best on the desktop monitor before making it public. I still find some shots look great on the retina display, but on a normal screen just look a bit rubbish. Here's today's pic on flickr.
So there it is. What's your morning phone/commute routine?
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