We were recently inspired by the First&20 project, which presents the home screens of some notable iPhone users. So, we've taken screenshots of our own iPhone home screens for a little comparison.

Once you've purchased an app, you audition it on your phone. Its usefulness determines its spot on the phone. For most of us, only the top apps - those we use most often or love the most - make it to the home screen. While browsing the results, we noticed some trends.

1. Of the 11 bloggers who participated, seven had a Twitter app on their homescreen. Twitterrific was the most popular (Aron, Chris, Mike Schramm and me), followed by TweetDeck (Kevin and Brett) and finally Twitterfon (Erica).
2. Only three of us had an IM app, including Beejive (Aron and Victor) and Yammer (Kevin).
3. Six of us edited the default dock, most notably Kevin whose tricked-out iPhone is the envy of us all.
4. All but one (Kevin) had the Maps app on the homepage
5. Five of us have some sort of productivity app. The most popular is Daylite Touch (Steve and me). Mindmeister, Doris and Toodledo (Brett, Kevin and Victor, respectively) are tied with one each.
6. Brett, Chris, Erica, Kevin and I all had less than five bars of connectivity.
7. Mike Schramm has the most unread email messages. He's the popular one.

Click the gallery below to check out who's got what. The final observation is that the homepage is in a constant state of flux. I occasionally shuffle a new app to the top of the heap. Additionally, games are grouped together, so it's quite unlikely I'd ever have one up front.

What's on your home screen?

With over 75,000 applications to choose from, it's no secret that every iPhone or iPod touch user has a different set of "favorites". A new website, First & 20, is shedding some light on the mystery of home screens starting with some popular website designers, developers, and writers you may have heard of.

The website's concept is pretty simple - get a glimpse of the home screens of popular Apple or online notables such as Joe Hewitt, John Gruber, or Jason Snell. The creator hopes that the website will help you "see something you've never heard of" and discover some apps that are so good that they made it on the phones of top developers, writers, engineers, and bloggers in the Apple world. The reason behind just featuring the home screen is also simple. While many people may have the same applications, the question is "how many love it enough to have it on their home screen, one of their first twenty apps."

In my experience, the website has opened me up to a few new applications and even some new ways to organize them. Leave a comment if you find someone's home screen to be of particular interest to you.

Rearranging the icons on the home screen of your iPhone is a part of the customization fun that Apple built in. However, if you rearranged your icons and want them back to factory specifications, it is as easy as a simple tap. Just navigate to Settings > General > Reset. Once there, select the "Reset Home Screen Layout" button. A dialog will pop-up asking for a confirmation.

Once you return to the home screen, you will notice that all the icons are placed just like they were when you first turned on your iPhone! Third-party applications' icons will follow the default applications.

Want more iPhone tips and tricks like this? Just visit the TUAW iPhone 101 section.

The iPhone's home screen works just fine with 16 application icons on the main screen and four more on the dock at the bottom. It still works well with another screenful of 16 more apps on the adjacent screen.

But, says Chris Devers, as you start adding more apps, the home screen UI doesn't scale well to cope with them. Flicking across five screens of apps to find the one you want is time-consuming. And moving an app from screen five to screen three is chaotic, unless you've left "gaps" on each screen as you went along - in which case you'd have six to juggle, not five. And even then, it's still chaotic.

OK, so not everyone is going to be collecting that many third party apps. But for people who do, says Chris, there needs to be a better solution than this. He's posted a set on Flickr to illustrate his point.

What might work? A Quicksilver- or Spotlight-style app, where you type some characters from the name of the app you want and it gets launched? Or a gesture launcher, where you "draw" what you're looking for?

Here are two simple but useful tips from TUAW readers David B Alford and Andrew Akker that help you navigate through your iPhone or iPod home screens. David points out that if you tap just to the left or to the right of the dots at the bottom of your screen, you can move a page at a time without having to drag. Tap left, you move left. Tap right, you move right. It's quick and it's easy.

Andrew figured out how to pause his drag Home screen drags. If you start to move between screens by dragging and then tap the dots control during that drag, screen pauses. You'll see bits of both home screens at once, and can interact with them normally by tapping icons. You can see up to 24 icons at once (16 off to one side, 4 along the other side, and 4 in the bar at the bottom).

I've tested both tips extensively and they work great -- two really nice additions to one's Home-screens skills.

I don't know about you all, but considering I'm not in the market for a pricey, tiny notebook, and I don't need yet another thing hooked up to my TV, the best news I heard at the Keynote today was about this iPhone "January update" (does that mean there'll be one every month?) coming soon to your iTunes. Included in the free update to iPhone users:

• An updated Maps that will actually find your location automatically by triangulating cell towers (we saw this a while ago), and give you the option to add a pin to the map
• Web Clips, cutouts of web pages that you can attach to an icon sitting right there on the homescreen.
  
• A customizable homescreen and dock (just hold an icon to get them wiggling, and then move them around as you please), and up to nine homescreen pages total
• The update will also add chapter navigation for iPhone video, and subtitle/audio options as well.
• And though the readers in our IRC channel weren't very impressed with this one, the iPhone will now feature multiple SMS sending.

Very awesome update for the iPhone, completely free and available on download in iTunes right now (!), and definitely an update that will set the stage for all the third party applications we're supposed to see next month. Bring on the SDK!