iPhone productivity application reviewed: WhatTasks

The GTD galore is spreading along quite nicely, not only in a vertical direction, by reaching more and more adepts in its traditional western cultural space, but also in new spaces, some of them well over the Atlantic Ocean. One of these days I found the first Brasilian iPhone application which claims to implement the core GTD rules. The application is called WhatTasks and it costs 3,99 USD at the Apple AppStore (on the WhatTasks web page they are advertising a 4,99 USD price, but they also say that “international pricing is available”, so I guess I’ve been included in some kind of discount…). I’ve been contacted directly by the developer, Felipe Belo, a few weeks ago, with a polite request to tell my opinion about this. So, after I finally set up my new 3g iPhone – a white one, you can imagine that? – I thought I should give it a try.

The first thing to know about WhatTasks is that it comes in 2 flavors, a free, limited version, and a full featured version at the price of 3,99 USD. The limited version is called WhatTasks Lite and I installed it on my iPhone 2 weeks ago. What this application is doing is basically a list management. You can create as many lists as you want and add items to them. Once an item is done you can check it out. That’s basically all. It manages the “what” in your everyday activities.

But the real power of the application comes in the paid version (this is somehow predictable, if you ask me). The paid version also gives you access to the “when” and “where” of your activities. This is one of the core principles of GTD: you are doing actions in contexts and at specific dates. You are not just a robot which does everything as it comes, regardless of the specific time or place: you can group your spaces of action into contexts, and you can also group your doing intervals in time chunks: right now, tomorrow or even someday / maybe, if you are not sure of the exact schedule. By adding the “when” and “where” dimensions to the “what” of an action, WhatTasks really comes close to the GTD aware user.

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PocketTweets – an iPhone twitter client

Yesterday I was briefly describing two GTD-like applications, both based on Leopard’s new iCal engine, Anxiety and Today. While browsing on the Today’s authors website I also noticed that they launched an iPhone twitter client. I’m a twitter addict – although I’m not (yet) a twitter ranter, keeping my tweets at a normal pace – so having a new toy for my toy was a thing I could never miss. So, after some reading on the main Pockettweets home page, here I am, with a quick and clean review:

First of all, pockettweets is a web based client, so you will access it through your Mobile Safari, where you will input this URL: http://www.pockettweets.com (If you access it from your regular browser you will receive a normal page, yeap, they are using some redirection based on your user-agent).

The main screen when you first access pockettweets is the public timeline:

The login window is a slick semi-transparent window:

Once logged in, you are presented with the normal “you + friends” twitter timeline:

The “star” and “@” icons on the right are standing for “starring this tweet” and “conversation with…” functions. As you already guessed, but just wanted to be sure. Adding a tweet is also easy, by using the “update” balloon-button:

After hitting “update” your tweet will be live and… well, tweeting

Pockettweets offer also some shortcuts to frequently used functionalities for the twitter power-user, but they are grouped in a toolbar. For some reason, the toolbar is located on the bottom of the screen, and is accessed by a button on the top of the page. If you ask me, I say that the toolbar could be easily placed on top, but maybe there are some usability issues that I’m not aware of. Anyway, clicking on the “toolbar” gives you this:

You can quickly access from the toolbar the “you + friends” timeline (already saw that), your replies (or twitter conversations):

your direct messages:

and of course your personal twitter archives:

All in all pockettweets is a slick application. I could use it when I’m in the mood for something new, but, most of time I’ll use the mobile twitter interface. Nevertheless, pockettweets is a good example of what one can do with a nice API (provided by twitter) and a nice user interface (provided by Apple).

As a user, you have nothing left to do, than to start some hype .