Month: February 2012

A Clear Review

Some people thrive on lists. They have lists for errands, groceries, chores, ideas, dog names, and so on. I am one such fellow. I keep lists to help me remember things, but also to help clear my mind. The moment when the need to make a list hits could be at any time.

For me, a good list app needs to be both fast and available. Clear is both of those while also managing to be unique and quite unconventional.

As any reader of this website knows, I am an avid user of OmniFocus. Any list I may jot down will eventually work its way into OmniFocus. But the biggest caveat with OmniFocus is its speed. It takes more than a few seconds to launch the iPhone app and enter something in. New OmniFocus items beg to be given contexts, projects, start dates, and due dates. While this is OmniFocus’s greatest strength, there are times when this is also OmniFocus’s greatest weakness.

And so there are two things I like about Clear:

  • As a list app it is fast to use and to navigate. It launches up very quickly, you can enter in a slew of items in no time, and you can get to a particular list very quickly as well.

  • As a man who simply has an affinity for fine software, Clear stands apart as a very unique and clever app. I dive into this a bit more in my review below, but even if you are not in the market for a new list app, Clear is worth checking out if only to experience its unique design and user interface.

Clear

Clear is a list app for the iPhone like no other. When you’re in the app you only see your color-based lists. Clear is an app without chrome or buttons or menu bars or metadata. Each item holds just 30 characters of text, and there are no due dates or notes or projects.

It has the underlying simplicity and ease of use that an app with just a white background and an unordered list of items would have. And yet, through the use of color and actions and gestures, clear has a surprising amount of life to it.

Clear is literally just pixels and gestures. But combined in just the right way to make an app that is a unique and clever blend of simplicity and spunk.

Action-Centric

Clear relies heavily on the use of color and gestures to navigate. It is very action-centric. Nearly all the gestures that you normally do on the iPhone — swiping up and down, left and right, pinching open and closed — are the ways that you navigate the app. The way Clear works is quite unconventional compared to other list apps, and yet all the actions feel natural because they are common gestures for anyone that’s used an iPhone for longer than their lunch break.

When you’re in a list, you pull the whole list down to create a new item at the top of the list. Or, if you want the new item inserted somewhere other than at the top you can pinch open the list and insert a new item anywhere you like.

Swiping left-to-right completes a task, swiping the opposite deletes it. Swiping left-to-right again on that task un-completes it. Pulling up on your list clears out all the crossed off items, and pinching the list closed takes you up a level to see the menu of all your currently active lists.

In addition to pulling down or pinching open, you can also add a new item to the list by tapping in the blank space underneath your list. A new list item “drops down” and you can then fill in its contents. If you want to quickly add a series of new items, then pull down from within the item creation pane. This is actually an extremely quick way to add new items to your list as fast as your thumbs can tap them out.

Even though Clear relies heavily on the iOS pinching gestures to navigate within lists and for adding new items, the app was still designed so that it can be used one-handed. For example, when pulling a list to add a new item, if you continue to pull down you will get an option to switch lists:

Pull down further to go to a different level in Clear

You can navigate through the whole app this way.

Despite its extreme reliance on gestures and actions, I found Clear to be surprisingly discoverable. And if that’s not enough, a brief pre-launch tutorial guides you through the first time you launch the app, and you’re even presented with a list of pre-populated to-do items which inform you how to use the app.

Colorful

Like I said, Clear is just pixels and gestures. The lists are color-based with the darker colors at the top to signify greater importance.

You can re-order items by tapping and holding to move them. And as you navigate through the different hierarchies of the app the colors change as well. The default color scheme has “red hot items” as the individual list pane, cool blue items as the pane showing all your lists, and then a cooler slate grey for the menu.

You can change your color scheme in the menu. There are red, green, pink, grey, and black themes. Also there may or may not be some easter eggs to be found in the app related to themes. But that’s all they’ll let me say.

Hierarchy

One of the things that instantly struck me was the spatial stacking that Clear uses to convey hierarchy.

Clear's Hierarchy

A typical iOS app has a hierarchy that goes left to right. Meaning, the left-most pane is the highest level and the right-most pane is the furthest drilled down into the app. For example, in Mail if you hit the back button enough times your left-most pane will be the list of your mailboxes; as you move deeper into Mail it takes you to the panes that exist on the right until you get all the way into an individual message.

For Clear, the hierarchy goes top to bottom as you can see in the image above. Also worth noting is that Clear’s bottom-most pane is an individual list — you can not drill down to an individual item. Further emphasizing the forced simplicity of Clear.

This spatial stacking is different than the way most apps work, but because of Clear’s gesture-based navigation it really works well. When you are pulling down to add a new item, the bar for that item “folds up” as if coming from underneath. Likewise, when you pinch open for a new item in a list, the item folds open. The animations are quite clever and fit in well with the unique hierarchy structure of the app.

Clearclusion

For the connoisseurs of fine iOS app or list apps alike, Clear is definitely worth checking out. And it’s just a buck in the iTunes App Store.

A Clear Review

Q&A Transcript From Tim Cook’s Speech at Goldman Sachs  →

A lot of quotable quotes from Tim Cook today. When asked about iPad competitors:

Price is rarely the most important thing. A cheap product might sell some units. Somebody gets it home and they feel great when they pay the money, but then they get it home and use it and the joy is gone. The joy is gone every day that they use it until they aren’t using it anymore. You don’t keep remembering “I got a good deal!” because you hate it!

And, speaking of iPad usage, Cook uses his iPad for 80- to 90-percent of his work and entertainment:

We started using [the iPad] at Apple well before it was launched. We had our shades pulled so no one could see us, but it quickly became that 80-90% of my consumption and work was done on the iPad. From the first day it shipped, we thought that the tablet market would become larger than the PC market and it was just a matter of the time it took for that to occur. I feel that stronger today than I did then. As I look out and I see all of these incredible usages for it, I see the incredible rate and pace of innovation

Q&A Transcript From Tim Cook’s Speech at Goldman Sachs

True Fans Instead

Yesterday, MG Siegler wrote a post titled, “Content Everywhere, But Not A Drop To Drink”. In it, he talks about how there are many mainstream tech writers who put little to no thought into their reporting.

Most are stories written with little or no research done. They’re written as quickly as possible. The faster the better. Most are just rehashing information that spread by some other means. But that’s great, it means stories can be written without any burden beyond the writer having to read a little bit and type words fast. Many are written without the writer even having to think.

Siegler concludes by saying that those who do put thought and time into their work will eventually be out of a job or else be forced to start feeding the pageview machine in order to get enough advertising income to support their writing.

Federico Viticci and Matt Alexander each responded with optimistic articles stating that thoughtful writing does still and will continue to have a place online. I, too, want to add a positive take on what Siegler is talking about.

It has been nearly a year since I took this site full time, and I think it’s fair to say that shawnblanc.net is proof you do not have to feed the pageview machine to generate a full-time income from your website. Nor do you even have to be a prolific, “A-list” blogger.

Compared to prolific writers, A-listers, or team-published sites, my website receives just a modicum of traffic. I average 150,000 pageviews in a month and have a daily audience of 12,000 RSS subscribers. In the 5 years that I’ve been writing here, none of my article have hit the top of Techmeme, Hacker News, Reddit, or even Digg. I don’t have any sources inside Apple, I don’t get invited to press events, nor do I get pre-release review-units of the coolest gadgets.

And yet, here I am, writing this site as my full-time gig. How so?

It’s because I have an incredible readership. Or, in the words of Kevin Kelly, I have 1,000 true fans. Half of this site’s income is from its membership base. And since I am fortunate enough to have readers who are willing to sign up as members and directly support this site, I am not fully dependent upon advertising revenue.

This is, of course, not to say that a membership model like mine would work for every website. But it works for this one, and it’s proof that readers are willing to directly support writers who don’t post link bait.

There are enough people reading on the internet that you don’t have to be mainstream to have a substantial enough readership to support your writing.

As I wrote last summer, my business model for this site is to give current readers — you guys — a first-class site that you want to read every day. My idea of SEO is to write with passion, and my idea of link bait is to publish stuff that you guys love.

Thus, everything I write and everything I link to is for the sake of the current reader. To all the members and readers of shawnblanc.net who’ve made that possible: thank you.

Related reading:

True Fans Instead

Sweet App: QuickShot

QuickShot is like DropVox but for images.

I found this iPhone app by spying on David Barnard’s Home screen. You use QuickShot to take a photo and it will then upload the image to Dropbox for you. It uploads in the background too, so you just snap a pic and close the app.

David explained how he uses the app to take pictures of all his tax-deductible, business expense receipts when on the go. When I read that, I thought to myself, what an extremely clever idea.

I keep my business receipts in Yojimbo, and so I’ve set up a folder action on my QuickShot Dropbox folder to run the below AppleScript. What the AppleScript does is: when I take a photo of a receipt using QuickShot the image will be tossed into Yojimbo with the tags “receipt” and “viaDropbox” and then the original image is deleted from my Dropbox folder.1


on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
    repeat with x from 1 to the count of these_items
        set theFile to item x of these_items
        set theTags to {"receipt", "viaDropbox"}
        try
            tell application "Yojimbo"
                set newItem to (import theFile)
                add tags theTags to newItem
            end tell
        end try
    end repeat
    tell application "Finder"
        delete these_items
    end tell
end adding folder items to

QuickShot is universal and just $1.99 in the iTunes App Store.

  1. Thanks to my pal, Brett Kelly, for a bit of AppleScript debugging to get the script to work right. Actually, especially thanks to him because it’s a script that works with Yojimbo and we all know he’s an Evernote guy. ↵
Sweet App: QuickShot

Another Kickstarter Record: Double Fine Adventure Game  →

Speaking of Kickstarter records, Double Fine Adventure is on pace to blow every single record out of the water. Sweet mercy. They launched their project just last night, and after 18 hours they are already 200% funded. But here’s the kicker: that 200% funding means they’ve already raised over $800,000 and there’s still another month to go. Crikey.

Another Kickstarter Record: Double Fine Adventure Game

Elevation Dock: The Most-Funded Project on Kickstarter Ever  →

Yesterday the Elevation Dock surpassed the TikTok’s record of $942,578 and became the most-funded Kickstarter project ever. And there’s still two days left to back the Elevation Dock — looks like it’ll break a million.

Update: They did break a million.

Update 2: The Elevation Dock is no longer the most-funded project on Kickstarter ever.

Elevation Dock: The Most-Funded Project on Kickstarter Ever

Tweetbot for iPad Review

Great design is often polarizing. When opinions about your design work seem to be either extremely positive or extremely negative then it’s likely that you’ve hit a home run.

And I can think of no other Twitter client that has received more polarized praise and criticism than Tweetbot. People seem to love it or hate it; very few are just “meh” about it.

I check Twitter on my iPhone an order of magnitude more than on my Mac and especially on my iPad. It’s no secret that I love Tweetbot. I’ve been using the iPhone app as my main Twitter client since late 2010 when the app was still in its early beta days.

Up until recently I have always used the “official” Twitter for iPad app. It always struck me as odd that an app on my iPhone (Tweetbot) could serve as a better twitter client than one on my iPad (Twitter). But now Tweetbot has an iPad version. And it rocks.

The most obvious differentiator between Tweetbot and other Twitter clients is that Tapbots-style of design. It permeates all of their apps and it is a part of their brand. But design for the sake of design is never enough.

No doubt that the vast majority of those who read this site are familiar with form-versus-function commandment: thou shall not let form trump function. The way an app works is far more important than the way an app looks.

Tweetbot is that rare bird of an app that carries an extremely strong and unique mix of both form and function.

Every single pixel is completely customized. The Tapbots color pallet of blue and black and grey with textures and gradients is prevalent throughout. So too, every sound is unique with the playful robotic sounds of clicks and swooshes.

But it doesn’t stop there. The amount of custom design in this app is only surpassed by the amount of functionality and usability tucked underneath those pixels.

Tweetbot, even with its extremely custom design, is still an app with greater function than form. Though the first thing you see is the custom designs done by Mark Jardine, and these are the pixels which are always before you when you use the app, what makes the app great is how functional it is.

Over time I’ve become so very used to Tweetbot’s functionality that it’s an app which has stuck on my iPhone’s Home screen since its beginning. And now it’s stuck on my iPad’s Home screen as well.

If you love Tweetbot on your iPhone, you’re going to love it for iPad. It carries all same power-user-friendly bells and whistles that the iPhone version has.

Here are a few of the iPad app’s features which stand out to me:

  • Tweetbot for iPad still treats lists as first class citizens. This is one of my favorite bits about the iPhone app and I am glad that on the iPad it is still easy to set lists as your main timeline view.

  • Reading articles via the in-app browser is fantastic. You get a full-screen browser along with that same awesome Readability / Instapaper mobilizer toggle that the iPhone app when in the in-app browser. Just flip the switch and you get a text-friendly layout of the site you’re on:

Readability view in Tweetbot for iPad

  • Tapping an Instagram or other linked image in your timeline darkens out the background and expands the image:

Viewing full-size images in Tweetbot for iPad

  • Composing a new tweet is a lot more spacious than the official Twitter client, and has the same quick-access buttons that Tweetbot for iPhone does:

Composing a new tweet in Tweetbot for iPad

Tweetbot for iPad is a power Twitter user’s best friend. It’s an ideal app for those who make good use of lists and who follow folks who post a lot of links to articles. You can still apply filters to mute certain users or hashtags, you can see your favorites, and retweets, and more.

I’ve been using it for the past several weeks and the more I use it the more I like it. Highly recommended.

Here’s the iTunes App Store link.

Tweetbot for iPad Review