I'm not famous enough to be featured on First & 20, but I do have a lot of friends and family asking me to recommend iPhone apps to them.

So here's my home screen and I little bit of explanation behind it.

The first thing you'll notice about my home screen is that I only keep three apps in my dock. It's not that those are the only three I use on a near constant basis - iPod probably deserves to be down there, too. But, back when iPhone OS 2.0 came out and the App Store was still young, I saw someone with just a three-app dock and knew it was a thing of beauty.

We'll start there: Phone and Mail are obvious. At one point I had the Google Voice web app in place of the phone, but it's a cumbersome solution in search of a problem and the icon belongs in Windows XP. 

In the world of iPhone to-do list apps, Things is my favorite. I used to use OmniFocus, and while I still recommend it to some people, it was just too powerful and overwhelming for my uses (though it does have that killer location-aware to-do list feature). But Things is wonderful - very iPhone like, but not too heavy on the graphics. Very easy to use, and it syncs easily with it's Mac counterpart.

My home screen icons are somewhat arranged by how often I use them: the most frequently used are on the edges (with the exception of Runmeter, which I keep on my homescreen more out of motivation than frequency of use). 

On the left, I have Calendar, which is very useful for my work scheduling, and Clock, which serves as my daily wake-up call, as well as laundry and kitchen timer. Tweetie is by far my favorite iPhone Twitter app, and I've tried a lot of them. Best combination of features and design. A quintessential iPhone app. And of course, there's iPod, where all of my podcast- and audiobook-listening gets taken care of.

In the next vertical row, I have Byline, my current RSS reader of choice. It makes me very sad that the developer hasn't updated his app in such a long time and that it now lags behind many of the feed readers on the app store. I've almost replaced it several times, by I'm just in love with it's icon and interface. Next, we have Maps, which not only serves me for directions, but also doubles as a handy yellow pages. I haven't messed with any of the turn-by-turn GPS apps in the App Store primarily because Maps gives me all I need (and I'm familiar enough with Houston that if I don't know where I'm going, I usually just need a general idea of where to go and not up-to-the-second directions). Below that, I have Evernote, another quintessential iPhone app. I'll save my Evernote elevator speech for another time, but suffice it to say the text-recognition for photos is a life-saver. And at the bottom, Safari - the app that made the iPhone the iPhone.

My next row is topped by another reading app, Instapaper. Bascially, Instapaper is a "Read This Later" application. You install the bookmarklet on you computer's browser, and when you come across an article or something you'd like to sit down and read at a future date, you click the bookmarklet and Instapaper converts it to an iPhone-readable format an links it to the app on your phone. More and more iPhone developers are adding Instapaper hooks into their own apps (Tweetie has it, for example).

Every iPhone homescreen should have a weather app, and mine is Weatherbug Elite (despite the hideous icon). I paid for this app because it gives you the ability to show multiple layers in the radar view. I use Dragon Dictation whenever I'm in the car and I need to jot down a note or send a longer email. It's near-flawless. BeeJiveIM might seem like an odd choice now that Meebo is out on the iPhone, but I still think it has some advantages. BeeJive allows me to chat with my AIM, Google Talk and Facebook friends (and any others, if I used some other IM service) at once. Its use of the iPhone Push Notification feature allows me to choose how long I stay "Online" while not actually inside the app.

On the last row, I've got Camera. I have yet to find a camera app worthy of replacing the default one on the homescreen, but I do have six or seven photography apps on my iPhone (Photoshop Mobile, CameraBag, Reel Director, etc.). I keep Settings on my homescreen because the iPhone OS needs a one- to two-tap way to toggle WiFi and 3G. Mint.com is my financial manager. The app itself doesn't do the entry of items or budgets, but it shows me all the data tracked by Mint's awesomely awesome web application. The iPhone app allows me to set custom alerts, like whenever I'm over-budget in a certain category or when there's any unusual activity on any account.

Last but not least, there's Runmeter. This app is a GPS tracking app that tracks your distance exercise and kicks the pants off of most stand-alone GPS devices. It allows me to export maps of my trips and save common routes. The coolest feature, though, it that it links up to my Twitter account and can auto-tweet the progress of my hikes or runs and then it reads back to me any replies to those tweets.

Now I want to know what's on your homescreen.