Since the phone is now the window to the soul, here’s my current home screen:
Things of possible interest (or more likely imminent boredom):
30 Seconds is a system shortcut I made that starts a thirty-second timer, which I use for my physical therapy exercises morning and night (I used to use a third-party app until I realized I didn’t need one)
Projectile (an app version of my project tracker), Bookshelf (reading tracker), Slash (blog engine), Storybook (writing app), Momentum (time tracker), and Liszt (to-do list) are all PWAs I’ve built
While it’s kind of weird (they’re the same exact app), I love that Marvin SxS is on the App Store alongside Marvin; I use the dark-background Marvin for fiction and the white-background Marvin for nonfiction
From left, the three bottom apps in the dock are Codex (notes app), Saturn (launcher), and Gate (Drafts clone), which are also PWAs I’ve built, and clearly I have a problem
I currently have 136 tabs open in mobile Safari, and clearly I have two problems
Saturn is my launcher app for my phone. It’s a small Go web app. The name comes from the Saturn V rocket launcher, and I wrote it as a replacement for Launch Center Pro (when it switched to a subscription model, because apparently I am allergic to those).
Overview
This is what it looks like:
The blue buttons are direct links to pages. There’s a very hard to see dark textbox at the bottom, and if I type something in there, the green buttons take that and execute a search somewhere else. Finally, the pink buttons open secondary panels, like this Notebooks panel:
On this panel, the lighter rectangle above the buttons is a search box that allows filtering through Vinci notebooks.
How I use Saturn
On my phone, I have it saved to my dock. It’s not set to be a PWA, because then the links would open in the in-app Safari; I prefer having them open in normal Safari.
I use Saturn pretty much every day. I mainly use it to set reminders, search Amazon, Goodreads, and eReaderIQ, and get to my journal and my daily review list.
The future
I’m largely happy with it as-is. Maybe some more refactoring of the buttons (the Search button is largely obsolete now that I’ve moved all those buttons to the main screen, for example), and it could use a little design love to make things more consistent (search boxes, for example), but that’s it.
