Jottpad is not and will not be a to-do list app, but that puts it into a weird category of why should I use it. From the genesis of Jottpad[1] - Start Something - I talk about where the idea came from, easily shareable lists. But, when I launched the iOS app five months later the focus was already muddied - Jottpad. What is it?.
Shawn Blanc writes in a recent review of Recall:
For one, I am (as are many of you, I suspect) a fan of apps that do one thing well. Secondly, the more my to-do list is filled with items not critical to my current projects or responsibilities then the more those non-critical items can dilute the importance of the truly critical ones.
Refocus
In what is typical of my enterprise engineering past I took a simple feature set and immediatly tried to generalize so it would appeal to more users. In the current App Store era of specialized, focused apps, I need to refocus.
Jottpad is easily sharable lists:
- shopping
- packing
- traveling
- prepatory [2]
Backing up this idea is the usage of Jottpad. When I talk to users, the happiest ones are using it for the above. Trying to shoehorn in task management or reminder type items is frustrating.
Keep Scratching
Marco Arment of Instapaper and Loren Britcher of Letterpress have both said they built their apps to “scratch an itch”.
There is definitely something to be said for evovling the app in a direction I, the developer, will use. I built Jottpad to scratch an itch but have floundered a bit in the evolution by not staying true to my original ideas.
Let this stand as a reminder to myself and a lesson in general. Don’t piss away the effort put into creating a shareable syncing engine which is non-trivial to host & maintain. More focused features are in the pipeline.
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Originally named Simplelyst, glad I was talked out of that. ↩
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And by prepatory I mean where you have compiled a bunch of items and want to quickly go through the list and check off to make sure nothing is forgotten. For example, you have a list of items or steps you always go through before a big client presentation. ↩