Introduction – what my honeycomb screen(s) look like

Hello everybody, I thought I’d write you all a quick note to (re)introduce myself to you.

For those of you who are long time readers, you may remember me as I wrote for this blog a few months back.  If you’d like to reminisce feel free:

https://androidincanada.ca/author/ryanmmoore/

I had left to write for another blog for a while, and you can see the posts I had written by clicking here.

But now I’m back.  And I’m eager to write about the items that you want to hear about.  I’ve been watching Tom keep up the pace on the Android news and I see he’s gathered quite the following.  So I’m happy to be aboard.

So what I thought I’d do is take a quick moment and let you know a bit about me.

I’ve been an Android user since the early days with the “Rogers Revolution”.  I picked up the HTC Magic and went through the fight to get our 1.6 [thanks Mike].  Since then I’ve picked up the Samsung Galaxy S Captivate, and I enjoy it a lot.  I’ve converted my wife, my sister in law, my sister and her husband, and several friends to the Android life.

Recently I’ve picked up an eeePad and I’m really enjoying that Honeycomb product.  One of my favourite posts was about “what do I use” and I’d like to give you guys a moment to view how my tablet is currently laid out.

Background

Currently I’m using a stock background [did have pictures of my kid now and again] as it’s dark enough to hide the one dead pixel on the screen

Screen 1 – Social

This is my social media pane.  I have my twitter feed [using Plume] stretched to fill the height, and then I have the widgets for G+ and Buzz [‘cuz well, even tho’ they’re so similar, they are still separate] hrmm… no link for Buzz in the market anymore.  Did they discontinue it?  Then there’s the icon for FriendMe [as there’s no widget yet].  I bounce between it and Friendcaster a fair bit as I still don’t know which is better.  Then I have some icons for some other social items – LinkedIn, Latitude, Talk and WordPress.  And there’s my 2 fun ‘searching’ apps:  SoundHound and Goggles.

Screen 2 – Distractions

This started out as my media panel, and then I included a couple of games.  There’s some method to the madness as I tend to have some grouping.  There’s the players along the bottom, Music, Movie playing (I had to download this just for the divx videos), Youtube and Gallery (with alternatives like Photoshop, SketchbookX and Bord for editing/drawing)  followed by the Camera.

For games across the top there’s the Angry Birds and then Stupid Zombie, and then it just grew as I added Star Legends and Dragon Fly.  I’ve also got the tried and true OpenSudoku and recently added the xPiano for my son.

PixelFixer is there as I just recently installed it [and it adds an icon when it does so, just haven’t gotten around to deleting it].

Screen 3 – Home

This is my main landing panel.  It’s got the Asus weather widget then all my icons / widgets to keep me organized.  My calendar, to-do, gmail and the email app and then a quick link to the browser.

Nothing ground breaking to be found here.

Screen 4 – Reading and Files

I’ve got my quick readers in the top corner: Aldiko for books, Perfect Viewer for comics and Reader for… well, I live most of my life by Reader.  Then I have a few icons for some mapping [Earth and Maps].

Across the middle is the swath of my file apps, both cloud and local.  For local files I have Wifi File Explorer and Astro File Manager to get files onto the tablet and accessing them.  For cloud I have SugarSync, DropBox, Sorami [for SkyDrive], Box (haven’t used it yet) and the Docs widget.  For a review of these services click here or here.  I’ve also got AndFTP to connect to my office NAS.

In the corners are a copy of Polaris Office, which isn’t too bad, and Market.

Screen 5 – Almost Empty

On my phone, my last screen is where I keep shortcuts to my contacts.  Here I just have my ‘social contacts’ for IM’ing.  eBuddy which’ll do all but Skype, then Skype, then the official Talk and Latitude again.

I have no idea what to put in here.  On my phone with 7 screens each are almost cramped – whereas with only 5 screens honeycomb has lots of ‘holes’.  This is because you get 7×8 on each screen of honeycomb for a total of 280 icons (conversely a phone with 7 screens gives 4×4 for a total of 1112).

I also put in the Weather Network widget as it is the only one I find that gives a really good Canadian weather look – however it’s not so Honeycomb friendly.

So, that’s how I’ve laid my screens out.  Is there anything I’m missing [keep in mind I have dozens more apps installed, just not on the desktop].

What tricks do you have to get the most efficiency out of your desktop?

Glad to be back and hope to interact with many of you soon.  Come find me on Google Plus.