My iPad’s Home Screen is a palette of productivity. It contains colorful applications for keeping me creative on the go. Last month instead of upgrading to the iPad 2 I remixed my Home Screen by touching up the applications I need and painting over the applications I don’t. It is amazing what a fresh coat of paint can do for last year’s iPad.

Before I could begin painting over my iPad’s Home Screen I needed to prepare the canvas. I set my Home Screen wallpaper to a less obtrusive default pattern, and moved my existing applications to subsequent screens. Looking at all of my applications I discovered a convenient pattern. Each application fit into one of five categories, Games, Utilities, Apple, Productivity, and Media. I quickly made folders for each of these categories and set them to the top positions of screen number two. With my canvas prepped, and my palette organized it was now time to begin mixing my apps and painting my Home Screen.

The iPad’s Dock is the foundation for my portable productivity picture. In it I colored my most important applications starting from the left.

• Mail for checking both my personal and corporate email accounts.
• Twitterrific for staying up-to-date with multiple Twitter conversations.
• Instapaper is the destination for all of my long form reading.
• Elements for writing blog entries, and maintaining my TaskPaper lists away from my desktop.
• Textastic is my syntax highlighting, Dropbox enabled, FTP uploading, secret weapon text editor for publishing Egg Freckles on the go.

I prefer this orientation for my dock’s icons because it starts with consumption on the left and leads to production on the right. Instapaper, my favorite iPad app takes center stage.

To fill in the top of the scene I picked hues from my productivity well. I am repainted my iPad’s Home Screen to express a more productive view so I left the games, utilities, and most Apple apps back on my palette screen.

• A direct link to Egg Freckles’ Mint statistics replaced Safari on my Home Screen. I can always surf the web from this link or from any number of my app’s embedded browsers.

• Apple made iBooks even more powerful now that it can read PDFs. Most of my ePub files come from outside sources, but I have a selected collection of Apple iBooks as well.

• The Early Edition is the best RSS reader I could find that doesn’t require Google Reader. My month without Google required me to make some sacrifices, and reading my RSS feeds in newspaper form was one of them.

• OmniGraffle is the $50 iPad app I bought the day the original iPad was released. I have found a use for it drawing floor plans and diagramming on the go.

• Row number two of my iPad is saturated with Apple’s iWork apps, the most polished productivity applications iOS has to offer. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are all required for editing popular office file formats on the iPad.

• Dropbox is the finishing touch on my iPad home Screen. Although many applications have built in Dropbox support, only the official app can make links and copy images directly from my Dropbox.

• Double clicking the iPad’s Home button and sliding the recently launched applications to the right reveals iPod app. Just another way of conserving space on my Home Screen.

With my Home Screen picture complete I have left a lot of negative space that I am not willing to fill in. Painting the perfect iPad Home Screen means leaving things out, and if I need additional apps my palette remains accessible on screen number two.