1. Scratching an itch with Listary

    The great thing about iOS devices, that one unicorn tear-like ingredient that makes iPhone and iPad users devotees and, yes, fanboys, are the apps.

    What made me love the Mac universe is this culture of indie software development, where dedicated people make cool software that they themselves needed and wanted. Software like SuperDuper, Quicksilver, Dragthing, VoodooPad, Caffeine and so on. This culture stuck and defined the Mac, especially when in the other side there where thousands of applications that we, macintosh users, couldn’t use. Yes, there where loads of Windows apps out there, but the Mac ones felt special.

    This kind of culture is now visible in iOS development. Android continues to boom as a software platform, but the iOS apps feel special and different, in a way. Stuff like Simplenote, Instapaper, Reeder, Due, Pastebot, these are apps that live in my iPhone and feel like where made by a person, not a corporation, and that exist solely to “scratch an itch”’.

    In that exact same way, there’s a new iOS app made by a couple of friends that feels like that. It’s called Listary and it scratches a whole lot of itches.

    Listary is, in essence, a list manager that syncs with Simplenote. Just that. A simple premise that offers so much.

    I use lists in Simplenote a lot. Mostly wishlists: stuff to buy, movies to watch, books to read, albums to listen to. But managing that in Simplenote is a pain since there’s no easy way to check something done.

    This is where Listary comes in: I load my wishlists on it and, if I’m in a mood to watch a movie, I quickly check my list to pick one and after watching I just check it off and it get’s automatically synced with Simplenote.

    It’s easy, it gets out of your way.

    I’ve been experimenting with ongoing grocery lists on it as well and it works pretty great: I add the stuff I want to buy in Notational Velocity, which gets synced with Simplenote which in turn gets synced with Listary. When shopping, I just check everything off and it get’s marked done everywhere else.

    The app is also full of nice touches, especially for a 1.0: I love the “Show Completed Items” option after you check an item off, and it’s incredibly easy to add a bunch of items in a row in the “Add Items” dialogue.

    There are a couple of minor things that bug me: the icon, while not blue, feels a little off, a little too complex in contrast to the simple and straightforward interface of the app, and adding stuff from Simplenote is hard if you (like me) don’t use tags. However I know that the developers are aware of this and will continue to work on it.

    All in all a cool app and another great example of indie developers doing cool software because they had an itch that needed scratching. How can you not love that?