Show me your home screen!
To me the empty home screen* of the N900 looked like an invitation, so I tried to fill it up with useless stuff as quickly as possible. The home screen configuration menu offers app launchers (shortcuts), bookmarks, widgets and contacts. Let's go through all four options in detail:
Shortcuts: I almost always have some tasks running in the background so launching an application would usually take three to four finger touches. Therefore the app launchers are extremely helpful to me.
Bookmarks: The idea is neat but not essential. The browser starts with a list of bookmarks anyway (how convenient).
Desktop widgets: I never believed in them, but the calendar widget might easily change this! It shows the current day and up to five upcoming events. It's a great addition to the fantastic calendar app.
Contact shortcuts: On this device, everything focuses on integrated contact management. For once, keeping your contacts up-to-date is actually useful and not just a time sink, simply because you can use them from almost everywhere. The logical conclusion follows: you can also add shortcuts to contacts on your home screen! It will show online status, avatar and nick of the chosen contact. Nice!
So what's on my current home screen?
- Calendar widget,
- two bookmarks,
- home ip widget,
- 12 app launchers (from top left to bottom right): settings, app manager, terminal, media player, photos, chess, notes (nice app, too), e-mail (ugly icon, and potentially confusing), IM (why does this look like an e-mail icon?!), browser, address book, phone (I had to disable the "launch when rotating" feature since phone calls would stall and eventually force me into device restarts. Too buggy for now),
- two contact shortcuts.
I know - it looks as if this was a Symbian smartphone (that is, ugly and horribly crowded). But I like it this way, at least for now =)
So what's on your current home screen?
*: I still think dashboard is a better name.
http://www.bluesata.com/desktop1.png
> I still think dashboard is a better name.
Home screen has always had the "Desktop" metapher. "Dashboard" in the Maemo5 terminology refers to the switcher displaying small windows of the already-running applications.