Yesterday morning, Nicholas Felton shipped his new iPhone app: Reporter.
I’ve long been a fan of Felton’s work. Heck, I have every single one of his Annual Reports, and as a matter of fact they happen to be sitting here right next to me.
My first impressions of the Reporter app (after just 24 hours with it) are great. The app is very well done, and seems to do a great job at removing as much friction and annoyance as possible for an app that’s designed by nature to ping you every couple of hours and ask you a series of questions about what you’re doing.
An app like this is meant to be used often for an extended period of time. In fact, it was used by Felton himself to build his 2012 Annual Report.
You don’t have to use just the stock questions it comes with. You can add any of your own. What questions should you add? Ones that would lend themselves to interesting data when aggregated. Here are some examples I saw used in Felton’s own 2012 report but that I didn’t see in the app:
- What is your current mood?
- What are you wearing?
- What are you drinking?
- What are you eating?
- What tools are you using?
(And, ironically, as I was just finishing up this link post, my iPhone buzzed letting my know it was time to fill out a report — my second of the day so far.)