A great piece by Khoi Vinh reviewing Moves, an app that tracks your movement and location throughout the day and the logs it for you:
No one wants to type more on a multi-touch phone or tablet if they don’t have to, so when they see an app demonstrate that typing can be eliminated entirely, it’s an eye-opening moment, for sure. But is it magic? Almost. To simplify is huge, but what matters just as much is the end result, what the user gets out of the simplification. If the simplified process produces satisfactory results, great. But it’s magic when the software generates a disproportionately meaningful output from that minimized input.
I haven’t tried out Moves yet, but I had a very similar “wow, it’s like magic” moment when the latest update to Day One came out last fall. That Day One updated added the ability to automatically pull in location and weather information and add it to your journal entry, and that little bit of extra info makes each entry seem, as Khoi would put it, disproportionately more meaningful.