Clear (for iPhone)

Beautiful, and taking advantage of the iPhone's touch capabilities to their full potential, the to-do list app, Clear for iPhone (99 cents), should be a work of wonder. And in design, it is. However, in usability, as a list-making application, it fails miserably. Clear clearly has no regard for what people actually do with mobile organization apps. Clear attempted, admirably, to simplify list making to the same extreme that Twitter sought to simplify communication, with character restrictions, limited functionality, tight features, but most of all, utter simplicity. Twitter has managed to pull this off, but Clear has not. There is precisely one type of person who should spend 99 cents on this app, and that is an iPhone app developer who surely could learn much from Clear's thoughtful interactive design.

Feature Failure
A good to-do list app requires, at the least, due dates and the ability to add notes. Those are characteristics you can easily find in any list making app, from Remember the Milk, to Awesome Note + Todo , to Weave. They're even in iOS 5's own free and included Reminders app. Beyond that core functionality, to-do lists can and should vary to meet the needs of different people. Reminders includes a geolocation function so that you can remind yourself to do something when you're in a particular place, like pick up your dry cleaning when you're in the same shopping plaza as your dry cleaner. Weave's niche is that it builds in the ability to manage to-do in terms of projects rather than single events. Remember the Milk and Reminders work with Siri on iPhone 4S. Some apps synchronize with other tools you might use like a Google Calendar or Evernote, but the point is they offer some features that cater to different kinds of users.

The problem with Clear is that it caters to no one, save those dazzled by interactive design with little substance behind it, because it has no features. The little functionality it does offer is so simplified you cannot do anything with it.

The name of any to-do item is limited to 28 characters. If you type more than 28 characters, the iPhone dings and vibrates, the app's way of hollering "Limit exceeded!" As much as I tried to work within these restrictions, my normal daily tasks simply cannot be described with accuracy in accurate in that limited space. I could shorthanded it if the item further opened to a notes field, but it doesn't. Twenty-eight characters is all you get. It is not enough for me, and I cannot imagine anyone else whose to-do lists are so simple that this app would benefit him or her in any way.

Design Genius
No one can reasonably argue that clear is ugly, backward, or unusable. Just the opposite: Clear's designers could win awards handily for the skill with which its interface was crafted. In terms of design, it is on par with Flipboard , an iPad app that wowed users for leveraging the tablet's touch capabilities. When ported to the iPhone, Flipboard remarkably lived up to its well-earned reputation despite the smaller screen. Both Flipboard and Clear are apps you want to touch. Play with them for even a few seconds, and they draw you in.

Upon installing Clear and launching it for the first time, the user is walked through the app via a series of tutorial screens that in themselves speak to the app's conscientious design choices. You're persuaded to try swiping, dragging, pinching, and tapping the screen before you know it. By the time you reach the actual app, there's no question how to use it.

What's so creative about the design? For starters there are no buttons to speak of, no navigation menu, no settings icons, not even a share button. You interact with the app exclusively through finger gestures. Swipe long to switch between different lists and the menu. Create a to-do item in one of three ways: pull down gently from above an existing list, tap gently below a list, or use two fingers to pull apart the two items between which you want to insert a new one.

Color demarcates priority. In the default theme, heat map, red is at the top to show the highest priority items while successive shades of orange and yellow trickle down to indicate less importance. Other themes, available in a settings menu that you can access through a couple of long swipes, use the same principle but with different colors.

Clearly Not
If you develop apps for a living or as part of your business, absolutely spend one dollar on the iPhone app Clear because there are a lot of design tricks you can learn (or steal) from it, including in its startup screens. The average person, however, likely will not find in Clear enough substance behind the app's gorgeous veneer and interactivity.

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