Amazing New iPhone App Clear | Hacker News Reader

Amazing New iPhone App Clear

techcrunch.com

17 pointsdaniel_levine12 comments

After reading the recent article by Lyons (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3587730) I'm getting real skeptical about press releases from TechCrunch.

How is this an "amazing" app? I watched the video and it just looks like another to-do list with some swipe and pinch functionality. I don't have any ill will towards the developers and I do hope they succeed, but this is not worth much as news.

Who else reading this suspected Techcrunch fund was an investor in the company who made this app?

Its just that when Techcrunch fawns over a todo app, it makes me suspect something is up. I am sure nothing is, and its a great app, but Techcrunch is hard to take seriously.

There is no 'suspected Techcrunch fund'. There's a fund created by the founder of TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, named the CrunchFund. (It's a kind of unfortunate name, since it does tie people's minds to TechCrunch.)

Michael Arrington isn't involved in TechCrunch, nor does he have any editorial oversight over it. I don't believe that Michael and Erick Schonfeld (the new editor) are on great terms.

I have two long-standing bets with myself. One bet is that no NCAA men's basketball team will top the 1975-1976 Indiana perfect record, and the second bet is that there isn't any other combination of software and hardware that beats the speed of entry of my HP200-LX with Buddy and the little database todo list.

But this app might be the one to make the second bet fall.

I use task apps quite a bit. For time sensitive task, I use Apple's Reminders. For general some-day tasks, I use Things. For dev tasks, I use lists in Textmate. For collaboration, I use Planbox.

But, here's the thing. Clear is the first task interface that I can call fun - AND it's easy to use.

Just downloaded and tried it and it looks really good. It has the simplicity of Notepad which I keep going back to after trying a new app and I have tried "many". I only wish they were cloud based and had a web version to it so my lists are not stuck on my iPhone alone. Hope that is coming!

What's interesting about this app is not that it's a better todo list, but that it's an app based almost entirely off gestures. Using only gestures means that it must use different paradigms of navigation than you might typically find on mobile, desktop, or web interfaces.

Is that really a good thing though, at least in the particular case of a todo list app? I love that they are pushing boundaries and trying to pave the way for other gesture-only apps (where practical), but for something as simple as navigating/editing a basic data tree, I would much rather use a single finger to tap buttons/text in less than 20 ms with instant load as opposed to taking half a second or more to perform some gesture(s) with sometimes 2+ fingers and wait for an animation.

I like that their review of this iPhone app says to refer to the video below, but when I read the article on my iPhone, the video doesn't even show up.

It's kind of cool to see webOS UI design innovations make it into mainstream iPhone apps. Palm was way ahead in several areas of webOS.

such as?

Official: http://impending.com/2012/02/clear-for-launch/

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