What’s on Your Home Screen, Jeremy Burge?
This is “What’s on Your Home Screen?” a Q&A column from OneZero. We want to understand more about how people use their smartphones — those life-consuming devices we dump hours into every day — to pave a way toward a better future. Or at least a more reflective one. We’ll add new entries regularly, and each will feature a new interview with a notable person about the apps they use, how they’re organized, and whether those red bubbles drive them nuts.
Perhaps no one on this planet knows more about emoji than Jeremy Burge. He founded Emojipedia and serves as a vice chair on the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, which makes key decisions around those iconic little characters.
(He is also, full disclosure, a friend — which is why I didn’t worry too much about giving him a hard time over his generic wallpaper.)
Burge’s professional life revolves around how people communicate using modern technology. And so I assumed he’d have a deliberate approach to his iPhone’s home screen — maybe even some wisdom for the rest of us.
What I didn’t expect is a recommendation for a weather app that openly berates its users.
What follows is our chat, edited for length and clarity.
Jeremy Burge: Because behind all the icons, it’s hard to get a picture that’s good! You put a picture of your friends or your family, whatever, it looks awful behind all the icons. I’ve looked through some of my own photos, and they don’t look good behind the icons. I just had black for ages, and I missed the color. Honestly, I could just never come up with something I was happy with.
Apple did an okay job with its default wallpapers. They’re better than anything I’ve come up with.
Show me!
I kind of hate it, but I kind of like it as well.
I think past me would have created a wallpaper. One of my teenage, nerdy things was creating kaleidoscope schemes for Mac, redesigning interface themes. I had one that looked like stationery, and it had little sharpeners and pencils in the title bar. It was ugly as anything, but I was really into the customization thing, designing all my own icons. I don’t place as much priority on it as 15-year-old me did.
The phone just became a tool. It’s the thing I want to get stuff done on. I’m more inclined to make my house look nice. I feel less ownership over the iPhone, because you can’t actually customize it that much.
I try to leave two spaces open. I just filled the other one a couple days ago. It just makes me happy. It makes me feel like I could try out a new app. When I get a new app, I want it straight on the home screen.
I did put one app in one of those spots two days ago. It’s called Calzones, and it’s a calendar with better time zone support than the built-in calendar. When you’ve got an appointment, it shows you what time it is in all the time zones. I want to get into it, but I’m not sure yet if I am. I’m kind of putting it there to see how it works out in my groove.
Yes, and nearly everyone I speak to is in different time zones quite often. I’m originally from Australia. I’m living in the U.K. at the moment. A lot of people I speak to for work are in the U.S., and the U.S. has too many time zones. Just pick one, you guys.
Just settle on one — mountain time or something.
I genuinely use it somewhat often. Not to plug my own thing, but sometimes I literally can’t find an emoji on the emoji keyboard that’s built into the iPhone. Apple’s iPhone emoji keyboard doesn’t have search. I like to use Apple’s keyboard because nearly all our users are actually iPhone users. It’s better to use what our users use. So, I like to use Apple’s keyboard, but sometimes I can’t find an emoji.
Some are hidden from Apple’s keyboards. All the humans have three gender options, but only two of them are displayed. The third one looks the same on Apple, but it actually doesn’t specify the gender. If I’m tweeting on behalf of Emojipedia, I don’t want to give the impression that I need this to be a woman shrugging, so I’ll search for the generic shrug, even if it looks like a woman to a lot of people. I want to be as clear about that as I can.
I mean, it’s not great. No one likes to copy and paste something if their system could suggest it. Definitely one of the biggest requests we get is for a search feature on iOS, which I’m sure they’ll put in someday. At the moment, the Mac one is quite bad, so I don’t think they want to implement it until it’s ready. Apple gets a lot of scrutiny.
This gender thing, some of that is on Unicode to standardize better. If there was a standard set of three for every emoji, you could make the interface better. Google does this a little, where they bury the gender under a submenu. There’s a ways to go, and it’s a matter of all the steps lining up: Unicode has to do some work, and Apple and the other vendors have to do some work, and users have to be happy. Platforms don’t like to make huge changes, because the users get upset. If you did a massive overhaul of the emoji keyboard tomorrow, you’d have a lot of upset people.
I’ve just in the past month bought a boat—a narrow boat for the British canals—and I’m going to move in there soon. So, I need to know where I’m going, and Google Maps is awful for it, and Open Canal Map is good for it.
They can take you all over the country. The canal network is quite extensive over here. You don’t really see them, because they wind through villages and towns and you don’t see them from the motorways or the train lines, but that’s going to be me. I’m going to live on a boat. I’ve got a big ol’ antenna for some high-speed 4G to come into the boat, and I’m going to see what that’s like.
Buried in the banking section as well — digital banking is quite European. I have a little folder there with credit card and money emojis there. Europe is much better at digital banking and open banking than the U.S., because people — at least in the U.K. — regularly deal in euros and pounds. You travel a lot, so therefore, whenever you think of finance, you think of at least two currencies.
One of the banking apps I use, I have balances in five different currencies ready to go. That’s called Revolut. It’s kind of a prepaid card, but they don’t charge any fees, and you can move your money between all the balances.
It is on-brand, and I hate the words Apple puts in there when you make a folder. You’ll drag something like Twitter onto Slack, and it’ll say something like “communication” or “productivity” — Apple calls nearly everything “productivity.”
Carrot is a weather app. There’s a whole Carrot family of apps. Carrot Weather is the only app I use from the Carrot family, but I find it more accurate than the built-in weather app on iOS. It has good wind direction — I like to ride my bike, and the wind direction makes a big difference.
The fun part is it’s got this snarky personality. It insults you when there’s bad weather. You open it up and it’ll be like, “You deserve this awful weather because you’re a terrible person,” or something.
You can change the snarky setting. I don’t know that you can make it be nice to you, but you can turn it off. But I feel an affinity for the Carrot app.
Let’s see what it says now.
[Carrot makes a joke about how Jeremy will never fit into his skinny jeans again.]
It’s a bit harsh, but for me, I don’t mind a bit of my app giving me a hard time.
Well, it’s also a good weather app. I wouldn’t like it if it just snarked at me.
I gave up on deleting apps. I’ve got a bunch of random airline apps, games that I might like once or twice or I might like to play with my nephews — very incidental. It’s a wasteland, but it’s ready for search, so why not leave it there?
I use badges and notifications for the same thing — I turn them off for everything, except the ones I want. I don’t mind a notification for a Twitter DM or Facebook Messenger or iMessage. It’s people I know. I just turn off everything else, because obviously, apps these days take advantage, they spam you all the time. Mostly, I don’t need to know.
Previously: What’s on Your Home Screen, Kyle Wiens?
What’s on Your Home Screen, Jeremy Burge?
Research & References of What’s on Your Home Screen, Jeremy Burge?|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
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