Edit: updated list http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/nh3/update_to_the_list_of_apps_that_are_useful_to_me/
I have noticed I often wish "Damn I wish someone had made an app for that" and when I search for it I can't find it. Then I outsource the search to facebook or other people; and they can usually say - yes, its called X. Which I can put down to an inability to know how to search for an app on my part; more than anything else.
With that in mind; I wanted to solve the problem of finding apps for other people.
The following is a list of apps that I find useful (and use often) for productive reasons:
The environment
This list is long. The most valuable ones are the top section that I use regularly.
Other things to mention:
Internal storage - I have a large internal memory card because I knew I would need lots of space. So I played the "out of sight out of mind game" and tried to give myself as much space as possible by buying a large internal card.
Battery - I use anker external battery blocks to save myself the trouble of worrying about batteries. If prepared I leave my house with 2 days of phone charge (of 100% use). I used to count "wins" of days I beat my phone battery (stay awake longer than it) but they are few and far between. Also I doubled my external battery power and it sits at two days not one (28000mA + 2*460ma spare phone batteries)
Phone - I have a Samsung S4 (android Running KitKat) because it has a few features I found useful that were not found in many other phones - Cheap, Removable battery, external storage card, replaceable case.
Screen cover - I am using the one that came with the phone still
I carry a spare phone case, in the beginning I used to go through one each month; now I have a harder case than before it hasn't broken.
MicroUSB cables - I went through a lot of effort to sort this out, it's still not sorted, but its "okay for now". The advice I have - buy several good cables (read online reviews about it), test them wherever possible, and realise that they die. Also carry a spare or two.
Restart - I restart my phone probably most days when it gets slow. It's got programming bugs, but this solution works for now.
The overlays
These sit on my screen all the time.
Data monitor - Gives an overview of bits per second upload or download. updated every second.
CpuTemp - Gives an overlay of the current core temperature. My phone is always hot, I run it hard with bluetooth, GPS and wifi blaring all the time. I also have a lot of active apps.
Mindfulness bell - My phone makes a chime every half hour to remind me to check, "Am I doing something of high-value right now?" it sometimes stops me from doing crap things.
Facebook chat heads - I often have them open, they have memory leaks and start slowing down my phone after a while, I close and reopen them when I care enough.
The normals:
Facebook - communicate with people. I do this a lot.
Inkpad - its a note-taking app, but not an exceptionally great one; open to a better suggestion.
Ingress - it makes me walk; it gave me friends; it put me in a community. Downside is that it takes up more time than you want to give it. It's a mobile GPS game. Join the Resistance.
Maps (google maps) - I use this most days; mostly for traffic assistance to places that I know how to get to.
Camera - I take about 1000 photos a month. Generic phone-app one.
Assistive light - Generic torch app (widget) I use this daily.
Hello - SMS app. I don't like it but its marginally better than the native one.
Sunrise calendar - I don't like the native calendar; I don't like this or any other calendar. This is the least bad one I have found. I have an app called "facebook sync" which helps with entering in a fraction of the events in my life.
Phone, address book, chrome browser.
GPS logger - I have a log of my current gps location every 5 minutes. If google tracks me I might as well track myself. I don't use this data yet but its free for me to track; so if I can find a use for the historic data that will be a win.
Quantified apps:
Fit - google fit; here for multiple redundancy
S Health - Samsung health - here for multiple redundancy
Fitbit - I wear a flex step tracker every day, and input my weight daily manually through this app
Basis - I wear a B1 watch, and track my sleep like a hawk.
Rescuetime - I track my hours on technology and wish it would give a better breakdown. (I also paid for their premium service)
Voice recorder - generic phone app; I record around 1-2 hours of things I do per week. Would like to increase that.
Narrative - I recently acquired a life-logging device called a narrative, and don't really know how to best use the data it gives. But its a start.
How are you feeling? - Mood tracking app - this one is broken but the best one I have found, it doesn't seem to open itself after a phone restart; so it won't remind you to enter in a current mood. I use a widget so that I can enter in the mood quickly. The best parts of this app are the way it lets you zoom out, and having a 10 point scale. I used to write a quick sentence about what I was feeling, but that took too much time so I stopped doing it.
Stopwatch - "hybrid stopwatch" - about once a week I time something and my phone didn't have a native one. This app is good at being a stopwatch.
Callinspector - tracks ingoing or outgoing calls and gives summaries of things like, who you most frequently call, how much data you use, etc. can also set data limits.
Misc
Powercalc - the best calculator app I could find
Night mode - for saving batter (it dims your screen), I don't use this often but it is good at what it does. I would consider an app that dims the blue light emitted from my screen; however I don't notice any negative sleep effects so I have been putting off getting around to it.
Advanced signal status - about once a month I am in a place with low phone signal - this one makes me feel better about knowing more details of what that means.
Ebay - To be able to buy those $5 solutions to problems on the spot is probably worth more than $5 of "impulse purchases" that they might be classified as.
Cal - another calendar app that sometimes catches events that the first one misses.
ES file explorer - for searching the guts of my phone for files that are annoying to find. Not as used or as useful as I thought it would be but still useful.
Maps.Me - I went on an exploring adventure to places without signal; so I needed an offline mapping system. This map saved my life.
Wikipedia - information lookup
Youtube - don't use it often, but its there.
How are you feeling? (again) - I have this in multiple places to make it as easy as possible for me to enter in this data
Play store - Makes it easy to find.
Gallery - I take a lot of photos, but this is the native gallery and I could use a better app.
Social
In no particular order;
Facebook groups, Yahoo Mail, Skype, Facebook Messenger chat heads, Whatsapp, meetup, google+, Hangouts, Slack, Viber, OKcupid, Gmail, Tinder.
They do social things. Not much to add here.
Not used:
Trello
Workflowy
pocketbook
snapchat
AnkiDroid - Anki memoriser app for a phone.
MyFitnessPal - looks like a really good app, have not used it
Fitocracy - looked good
I got these apps for a reason; but don't use them.
Not on my front pages:
These I don't use as often; or have not moved to my front pages (skipping the ones I didn't install or don't use)
S memo - samsung note taking thing, I rarely use, but do use once a month or so.
Drive, Docs, Sheets - The google package. Its terrible to interact with documents on your phone, but I still sometimes access things from my phone.
bubble - I don't think I have ever used this
Compass pro - gives extra details about direction. I never use it.
(ingress apps) Glypher, Agentstats, integrated timer, cram, notify
TripView (public transport app for my city)
Convertpad - converts numbers to other numbers. Sometimes quicker than a google search.
ABC Iview - National TV broadcasting channel app. Every program on this channel is uploaded to this app, I have used it once to watch a documentary since I got the app.
AnkiDroid - I don't need to memorise information in the way it is intended to be used; so I don't use it. Cram is also a flashcard app but I don't use it.
First aid - I know my first aid but I have it anyway for the marginal loss of 50mb of space.
Triangle scanner - I can scan details from NFC chips sometimes.
MX player - does videos better than native apps.
Zarchiver - Iunno. Does something.
Pandora - Never used
Soundcloud - used once every two months, some of my friends post music online.
Barcode scanner - never used
Diskusage - Very useful. Visualises where data is being taken up on your phone, helps when trying to free up space.
Swiftkey - Better than native keyboards. Gives more freedom, I wanted a keyboard with black background and pale keys, swiftkey has it.
Google calendar - don't use it, but its there to try to use.
Sleepbot - doesn't seem to work with my phone, also I track with other methods, and I forget to turn it on; so its entirely not useful in my life for sleep tracking.
My service provider's app.
AdobeAcrobat - use often; not via the icon though.
Wheresmydroid? - seems good to have; never used. My phone is attached to me too well for me to lose it often. I have it open most of the waking day maybe.
Uber - I don't use ubers.
Terminal emulator, AIDE, PdDroid party, Processing Android, An editor for processing, processing reference, learn C++ - programming apps for my phone, I don't use them, and I don't program much.
Airbnb - Have not used yet, done a few searches for estimating prices of things.
Heart rate - measures your heart rate using the camera/flash. Neat, not useful other than showing off to people how its possible to do.
Basis - (B1 app), - has less info available than their new app
BPM counter - Neat if you care about what a "BPM" is for music. Don't use often.
Sketch guru - fun to play with, draws things.
DJ studio 5 - I did a dj thing for a friend once, used my phone. was good.
Facebook calendar Sync - as the name says.
Dual N-back - I Don't use it. I don't think it has value giving properties.
Awesome calendar - I don't use but it comes with good reccomendations.
Battery monitor 3 - Makes a graph of temperature and frequency of the cores. Useful to see a few times. Eventually its a bell curve.
urbanspoon - local food places app.
Gumtree - Australian Ebay (also ebay owns it now)
Printer app to go with my printer
Car Roadside assistance app to go with my insurance
Virgin air entertainment app - you can use your phone while on the plane and download entertainment from their in-flight system.
Two things now;
What am I missing? Was this useful? Ask me to elaborate on any app and why I used it. If I get time I will do that anyway.
P.S. this took two hours to write.
P.P.S - I was intending to make, keep and maintain a list of useful apps, that is not what this document is. If there are enough suggestions that it's time to make and keep a list; I will do that.
Haha, thanks, but I already specced out and outsourced Stage 1 of the MVP :)))
Anyway, here's what I find lacking in other personal Todo apps:
1. Recurring Task Fragility
I rely on recurring / repeating tasks a lot, I use them to automate my life. The problem is, in most todo apps recurring tasks are too brittle.
For example, I have a task on 15th of each month. One month I decide to do it earlier, on 12th of the month. The natural way would be to just reassign the due date from 15th to 12th, but doing that would change the recurrence condition of the task: it will now recur on 12th of each month! And God forbid I delete the task because I don’t need it this month -- this would delete all future recurrences!
Because of all this, I’m forced to walk on eggshells around recurring tasks. I’m afraid to treat them as normal tasks. I can’t rename them, can’t delete them, can’t move them to another list, can’t change the due date.
This happens because most todo apps conflate the recurring task instance with the definition of recurring task. I want to de-conflate these concepts. In my app, the recurrence logic is defined by a Schedule Item, which ‘spawns’ recurring task instances that can be deleted, modified, renamed etc. You won’t accidentally change the recurrence settings of a task by editing it in the task list. If you want to modify the recurrence settings, go to Schedule and do that explicitly.
(As a bonus, in the above system all recurring tasks will be visible in one place, the Schedule. This is essentially my life program, my human crontab. I like the ability to edit my life in one place.)
(And there’s another bonus to this system: forward visibility of recurring tasks. Most todo apps don’t display recurring tasks in forecast views. My app will. When you define a Schedule Item in Schedule, the recurring tasks ‘spawned’ by it will be visible across the entire future timeline. That is, you can literally look at the day Sep 1st 3215 and see that you have to walk the dog, buy the groceries and arrange a check up with the doctor.)
2. Due Date Pollution
My personal productivity system is closer to Autofocus than to GTD, so when I have a task in my list, and don’t want or cannot do it at the moment, I want it to temporarily disappear from my list until I’m ready to do it.
The only way to “disappear” a task in most todo apps is to set its Due Date to Tomorrow or such, but if I do this to a dateless task, it would become dateful! Why the hell must I make my dateless tasks dateful just to dismiss them for a while?
A Due Date should only be used on tasks that must be done on that specific date, so it doesn’t make any sense on dateless tasks. Which brings us to the next topic, Dismiss:
3. Proper Dismiss.
So, to combat Due Date Pollution, I need a proper Dismiss Until command that hides the task until some condition is met without making the task dateful. For example, Dismiss Until Tomorrow Morning, or Dismiss Until September 1st, 2015. I would like this function to be easily accessible, for example via the swipe-away gesture on list items.
Now, Dismiss Until Tomorrow is nice, and Dismiss Until Evening is great, but I also want Dismiss until I’m at Work, Dismiss until I’m in Boston, Dismiss until I’m near Bob Smith, or even Dismiss Until (NASDAQ:AAPL < 100) AND (Weather in Moscow is Good). Which brings us to our next topic, Contexts and Triggers:
4. Contexts and Triggers
For example, I have a task which I want to do only on workdays, in the evening and outside of work. When these conditions are met, I want the task to be visible in my list, and otherwise it should stay hidden.
To implement this, my app will have an Active When field, which can specify activation conditions for the task. For the above task, that would be something along the lines of @workday AND @evening AND (NOT @work).
@work, @evening and @workday are Triggers. The terminology is not final, and I don’t yet know how to call them, but essentially Triggers are boolean functions that can be incorporated into tasks in order to activate them when certain events happen.
Triggers can also be used in Dismiss Until command, and I plan a version of Schedule based on Triggers. That is, you can specify conditions, and when these conditions are met, a specified task will appear in your task list.
5. Multi-line Todo Items.
I need multi-line todo items in order to word my tasks properly. A task titled “Widgets!” is much less meaningful than a task “Decide which Widget to buy. Ask Bob, he’s the expert on Widgets.” This may sound trivial, but many popular todo apps display todo items as single-line -- and Wunderlist is among them!
I’m not worried about the screen real estate occupied by multiline items. The primary way to consume a todo app these days is mobile, and scrolling on mobile is effortless.
So, to sum up, this is a hybrid of a todo app and IFTTT / Tasker for humans. I don’t think that there’s currently anything on the market that offers that. Anyway, the work is already underway, and the MVP should be ready by the end of the year. I’ll announce it here on Lesswrong.
Thats true, but at this point that's a sunk cost :).
However, as far as I know, there's nothing that has all these features together.
Things and Google Calendar have the best support for non-fragile recurring tasks,
Todoist has all your other features, but not quite in the way you want them. -Location aware and time aware tasks, but not other, smarter contexts. (I assume you're going to be doing plugins for individual smart contexts, otherwise I don't see how this would work). -Does multiple lines, but hidden in that you have to press Ctrl + M