Phoning It In

So, here's the quandary I'm in right now.

I have too many iPhone apps. I have almost five full pages of apps, and by God, that's too many. I need to start cutting them down. It's not that I mind five pages of apps, but I put some thought into creating logical categories of apps - 1 or 2 per page - and now that's thrown to hell. So I have to start trimming.

I'm a pack rat - and I think the reason I'm a pack rat is I always think - well, what if I need that later on. It's the same with my apps. There are several that I haven't used in awhile, and quite a few of those that I keep thinking - well, what if I need that later on? Better keep it.

It has to stop.

Now, one of the reasons I think I might "need it later on" is, quite frankly, I paid for the bleeping thing, and even if it was only $1.99 I hate to waste money on it. After all, I can't get my money's worth if it's not even on my device, can I? It's a bad attitude, I think, and just leads to me not being able to find stuff and my productivity - the thing the iPhone and the Cloud are supposed to enhance - takes a hit.

Another possibility is that it has some decent functionality that seems neat. But if I'm not using it - I'm not getting the benefit of that functionality. It also leads to a situation where I have some ill-thought-out redundancy. For example, I have two apps that do drawing. Each one has a decent feature or two that the other one doesn't have. I've kept both because - I never know when I'm going to need that feature! But I don't need two programs for it. In truth, I might not even need one - since I haven't used either enough to be happy with it....

You might notice that this entry is tagged "Cloud" - and that might seem to be a bit of a stretch when ostensibly this article is about iPhone apps. But my dedication to the Cloud concept is such that I think it should also be a feature in my iPhone apps. Does this app represent not just synching, but does it include a healthy Cloud consideration? All things being equal, I should keep an app that addresses the Cloud in some way, and get rid of the non-connected or just synch-to-a-desktop-program apps.

So enough of a preamble. On to today's thingamabob: Jott.

First, I love Jott the service. I first was turned on to Jott by Nozbe (more on that in another post) and then a David Pogue article hit pretty quickly after it. As Pogue says, Jott is your personal dictation service. It's pretty cool. You call up Jott, it asks you, "Who do you want to Jott?", you make a sort of coded reply, it confirms your choice, and then you dictate your message. The Jott service takes that message and does a pretty good job of translating it into text, and then - and here's the real killer feature - it does something with it.

That something is largely up to the way you have it configured, and in part based upon whether or not you want to pay. Jott connects to a variety of services through what it terms "Links," and some of the things it can connect to are blogs (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Live Journal), social networking services (Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr), about a million To Do applications (my personal fave Nozbe, but also Remember the Milk, Toodledo, Mentat, 30 Boxes, 43 Actions), plus a few others - like Google Calendar and Trapster. You can also create a list of contacts and dictate text messages or emails to them. And you can group those contacts and send out dictated text messages to the whole group. Jott essentially adds an easy voice entry system to all these things - blogs, calendars, to do lists, text messaging, and email.

Jott also claims to be a literal feed reader. On the go, but want to sort through your Engadget articles? Huffington Post? New York Times? Yahoo! Weather? ESPN? Jott can hook you up. It works, but throws you into a different area. (When asked "Who do you want to Jott?" you have to respond "Jott Feeds," and after confirming, you're asked what feed you want, with a typical phone-based menu - "Say or press 1 for the New York Times....") The machine voice is also a little tough to understand sometimes, due to a combination of flat tone and even pace. A neat idea, but one that is far from its core functionality.

The bad news, however, is that Jott isn't content with serving merely as a conduit to all these other things; it also fancies itself as a listmaker/todo app in its own right. You can leave notes for yourself, and organize Jotts into myriad lists. And you can check them off. Jott can send you a reminder on these items, as well.

The cool thing is that these items are all housed in the Cloud, on Jott servers, and there are several ways to interact with them. First, you can create Jotts through your cell phone(s). While your account is linked to one phone, you can set it up to recognize multiple phones (I have both my Verizon and iPhone pointing to it). Real manipulation of Jotts can be done via the website, a small desktop dashboard, or a newly re-engineered iPhone app.

Neat ideas, but Jott really suffers in the execution of all this functionality. It's a pretty simple and straightforward - almost elegant - list maker. You make a Jott, either by phoning it in, typing at a full browser, or tapping away on the iPhone. You can say it's a priority. You can move it to other lists. You can check it off and delete it..... and that's about it. Jotts are really wedded to their lists, so much so that you can move a Jott from Notes (which seems to be the generic catch-all area) into a list, but you can't move it out of the list and into Notes. You can see "All lists" and in the website version you can look at all the Jotts underneath each list. But you can't see all Jotts irrespective of the list that they're in.

Inside a list, you can sort Jotts by Date, Done, and Priority. You can move completed items to the trash (where they stay around forever until you empty the trash). Even in the website's All Lists view, you can't sort across lists. You also can't reorder Jotts within the list other than the specified Sorts - and I found that crippling. Have three priority Jotts and 10 non-priority Jotts, but one of those priority items really needs to be done first, and half of the non-priority Jotts aren't really important at all? Tough. Date, Done, or Priority.

Now, this simplicity might all be fine with you - and I found the approach appealing. So much so that I decided to try it in a full test run. I had Nozbe - a GTD to do list application - for all my personal things; but I had just moved into a new position and was getting a slew of tasks associated with work projects. I didn't want to crowd Nozbe with both my personal things and my work things; I initially started to and found that my next action list was getting HUGE. So I figured, let's try Jott. The functionality seemed like it would work, a different list for every project. And I could press the phone input into double duty - for personal things use a Nozbe link, and for work things either direct it to the Notes box or into one of the native Jott lists. If I was at work, I could easily type in a text Jott. In a meeting? I could use the iPhone app.

Entry was easy, and it worked really well. The problem for me came in trying to organize the Jotts. The thing I really like about the GTD approach - especially as executed through Nozbe - is that I can create tasks and put them into projects/categories. I can thus organize and deal with them that way and I can also pull the tasks I need to do now into "next actions" and view those all at once. You can't do this in Jott.

But this was a small quibble, I figured. Jott doesn't bill itself as a GTD tool, and this approach is really one of the hallmarks of GTD. Where I really became frustrated was in trying to sort the Jotts. What I swiftly came to realize was that I was adding Jotts true to their namesakes - I just wanted to jot things down, without worrying about what order they were supposed to go in. Frequently, I'll jot something down and realize - "Ooh. But before I do that, I have to do this." No such luck in Jott: Date, Done, or Priority. Going by Date, that is going to show up before this. I can prioritize this, but what if this and that have to do be done (prioritized) before some other thing? Again, both being prioritized, that shows up before this.....

Now, I also had some quibbles with the first version of the Jott iPhone software. It's layout really caused problems, because unlike the website, I couldn't see all my lists, even. I could display the three most important lists as icons at the bottom of the screen (and keep an icon for Recording), but as I came up with more work projects, I was coming up with more lists, and they (and Notes) were buried in the "More" icon. It just got really difficult to manage. To boot, using the dictation never seemed to work right. I would make a dictation, Jott would tell me to come back in a few minutes, and I would come back days later and it wouldn't be updated. That seems to be corrected in this latest version, which is a lot slicker and has a much better layout. But, still, the basic problem remains - I can't sort anything. As a to do list application, it still has problems - not as full featured as something like Nozbe, and in point of truth, it lacks some of the functionality of Zenbe lists (also Cloud-based, also very simple - a check box and the item - but with the added ability to actually move and hand-sort the items).

So, I'm going to remove the Jott app from my iPhone - but I'm going to keep my (pay) service because of the killer ability to use my phones to jot items, on the fly, into Facebook, Nozbe, GCal, and yes - with this little hack (also referenced here) - my Jotts end up in Evernote, as well. And that means, I can bypass Jott's software service even for those random notes that aren't status updates, appointments, or to do items. And that alone is worth it.