Jason Fried, giving a preview of the all-new calendar in Basecamp Next:
There is one thing in particular I love about this calendar. Instead of the standard month-at-a-time view, it shows the next 6 weeks. You can see the current week and 5 weeks into the future. It’s one of those things that is so incredibly obvious once you see it. Why doesn’t every calendar do this?
Calendars are primarily future-oriented. We care about what is scheduled to occur, or what is happening now. You may on occasion need to find the date of something in the past, but that is relatively rare. Yet, at the end of the month, we have to deal with the noise of over three weeks of past events.
Unlike their paper predecessors, computer calendars aren’t static, pre-printed a year at at time. They should take advantage of the fact they can dynamically update the interface based on the current date, and adapt to our needs. There is no reason they need be stuck on rigid day/week/month boundaries.
Everyone has probably already watched the video and read about the yet to be released to do app Clear. There has been a lot of buzz for the app because of the innovative and well-considered interaction design. If you haven’t seen it already, I’ve embedded it below:
Now, I’m really interested in this app as a designer and developer of software, and I’ll write more about that in another post. But, I’m equally as intrigued as someone who has never managed to use a to do list for any length of time, and I’m hoping Clear changes that. There are few reasons for that.
No checkboxes
The one thing I’ve always hated about to do apps is also the thing that is most synonymous with a “to do” app — the checkbox. It has never made sense to me. To do lists are literally about things to be done. Once it’s done, it should no longer exist in the realm of my to do list. I don’t want to see a list of my to do items with checked box and striked through text. From the video, it looks like Clear does away with this notion. There are only tasks, and tasks can be deleted or completed. I’ll be sincerely disappointed if there is a way to see completed items or mark an item as “undone”.
Fun
To do lists are fucking boring. All work and no play. Clear adds a sense of delight to the tedium, and I think that’s what people are really responding to. How do you add a task? With a pinch, and a satisfying pop. To complete? Swipe right with a nice animation, and a friendly chime. It actually looks fun to add and remove items from your to do list.
Clear is now “Waiting for Review”, so I guess we’ll know soon enough whether or not it lives up to expectations.
I still haven’t found a good iPhone app for remotely controlling my desktop. It’s not something I would use every day, but there a few use cases where it would really come in handy. Like wanting to stream something from my iMac to my Apple TV, but iTunes isn’t running. Like a fool, I’ve been walking all the way upstairs to open iTunes, or if I’m lazy and have my laptop close, connect over Screen Sharing to open it.
The only thing I really need from a remote is being able to launch apps. A few other functions like sleep/shutdown/reboot the computer would be nice as well. Bonus points for being able to perform actions on an app, such as pause a song in iTunes or quit the app. Thinking about these uses, I realized that it’s exactly what I use Alfred for on a daily basis.
Alfred
I love Alfred. It’s an app launcher, but you can also use it for searching locally or the web and has many other features as well. I’ve tried quite a few of these types of apps (Quicksilver, LaunchBar, Spotlight), but Alfred hits the sweet spot for me. Fast and simple, and does exactly what I want. New features are being added slowly, but steadily without bogging down the rest of the app.
So, Alfred does what I want already, it would be perfect if it could just act as a server to an iPhone app with the same interface. Since this doesn’t already exist, I thought it be fun to mock it up and see what it would look like.
Mockups
Here’s a few different screens. I certainly didn’t cover everything, but this covers the basics. I prefer Alfred with the “dark” theme, so I used that here as well.
Default Alfred screen after connecting to a computer, waiting for input. The machine you’re connected to is shown at the bottom.
Typing a letter starts filling in results, as soon as you start touch the list, the keyboard is dismissed. List will scroll if all results don’t fit.
Typed in full name of app shows a single result
Tapping an app launches it if not already running. If already running, shows actions to perform on that app. Actions unique to that app are in purple, actions for any app are white.
Of course it needs an icon, and I don’t think any other app can pull off the purple.
