The to-do app Sooner is a sign that to-do apps are already as good as they're going to get.
Saturday, December 8, 2012 at 09:38AM Just saw an article on The Next Web for Sooner, a "Wheel-Based" to-do app. This is what it's like:
Now, the speed with which you can add new projects and tasks seems nice, but come on, a wheel-based todo app? You're going to use as your visual motif something that implies a finite amount of space to add items to? More than that, you're going to abdicate a chunk of functional space in an app that exists to be functional, just because circles spin around and go woosh?
The needless arbitrary use of a spinning wheel screams "arbitrary change to distinguish ourselves in an overcrowded market" to me. Here's an idea, you obviously talented Sooner-programmers: don't make yet another todo app. Do something else! It may be that all 200,000 todo apps for iOS are deeply flawed, but sweet crap, do you know how long it would take me to try them all to figure that out? I mean, did you use them all and find them lacking, then said to yourselves "we can fix this?"
Seriously, you guys. Seriously.
This market is mature; is there really anything new and necessary you can add to a todo app? Sweet crap, I don't believe so. So you're left with new entrants having to add random stuff just to get noticed, because "recording my tasks" and "marking my tasks as complete" and "saving my tasks to a server to sync with other devices" and "look nice" have all been taken care of pretty thoroughly. And it's only going to get worse. We're already seeing it, obviously, but we're going to see more and more apps with even wilder "features" that look cool at first blush but do nothing to improve the crapdamn experience of an app you ideally are using several times a day.
I haven't used Sooner, but it looks like I'd get tired of that wheel really quickly, just like I would've gotten tired of Clear's day-glo koolaid vomit colour scheme, and Epic Win's admittedly fun looking RPG aspect. Not to be the old guy curmudgeon or anything -- even though I do it spectacularly -- but the more cruft you add to a todo app, the more fun features designed to give good demo, the slower your usage of the app is, because you need to wade through it in actual day-to-day usage.
I use Wunderlist. It's nice because it syncs across devices, there's a desktop app and a web interface. There are lists and you add todos and mark them as done. There's not much else because you don't need much else because if I'm consulting this app dozens of times a day -- like I goddamn do -- then I don't want to have to watch animations or spin crap or tend to a stupid garden or anything; I want to mark off my list and then start on the next thing. In some tracker apps this is fine: in Fitocracy it works, and the animations are fun, because they're minimal and anyway I only use the app after I exercise, not constantly throughout the day.
I mean, crap, what's next, a todo app where your "list" is a 3D gardenscape, and every one of your items is an animated fluffy bunny, and to mark your bunny item as complete you have to catch it with two fingers and feed it a carrot with a third?
Sadly, something like that is probably already in development.
Shut up.