He said it was as buggy as a Volkswagon dealership, but I’m pretty sure he overstated a little. We’ve talked about Dan Grover and his fantastic applications before, and the news of Shovebox for the iPhone has come at a time where he’s garnered quite a bit of buzz for his desktop application. Wonderwarp has consistently put out amazing software. The iPhone version of Otis made an official iPhone commercial, the desktop application was talked about extensively on Macbreak weekly, and now it’s only a matter of time before the public adopts shovebox on their iPhone.
Dan’s been in an ideological battle with twitter developer Alex Payne regarding his comments about “everything buckets”. I tend to agree with Dan on that one. I find it somewhat humours that someone who runs a service that could be considered an “everything bucket” for communications has a problem with the concept of stuffing an application with random snippets of information. Whether or not it was designed as a stuff it communication repository, or whether the public turned twitter into it matters little, the fact remains that we’re constantly stuffing snippets of our lives into twitter. Some do it with the intention of retrieving information from their life at a future date, others do it to show off to a community, but no matter how you slice it, twitters as much of an “everything bucket” as any of the desktop applications that Payne is talking about. Anyway, I’m digressing quite a bit from th actual point I want to make.
Payne says, “One of my Rules For Computing Happiness is: do not use software that does many things poorly.” Everything Buckets violate this rule up, down, and sideways.”
So I decided to write a Shovebox for iPhone review illustrating the things that the application does effectively, and how it actually enhances my day to day operations through some examples of how it has benefitted me over the last week.
- Need to get groceries for a particular reciepe? Don’t want to write it out? Why don’t you get the url from cooks.com and “shove it” into shovebox and sync it to your iPhone. Not only are you able to take that information with you, you get to save a few trees. Sounds beneficial to me.
- Actually, what if you’re about to take a 8 hour flight and want to catch up on all your reading from Macgasm.net, but ran out of time before you boarded a flight? Oh you can shove it to shovebox and have that one url bookmared for quick access. Sounds beneficial to me.
- What about bringing that recent logo design with you to a client meeting without having to lug around your computer? Well, you could send the image to your iphone through the built in sync tool. Issue solved. Wow, it’s starting to look like it fits into my mantra of happiness: only use software that does many things effectively (read: doesn’t fail whale me when the going gets tough).
- The best part about the Shovebox iPhone app? It can be a private and personal twitter account. That’s right, while I’m out on the town I can write myself a quick note about my latest crazy scheme to get rich quick (I self impose a 140 character limit). Even more impressive, I can write down my most witty thoughts and save them for twitter later, oh who am I kidding, I’m not all that witty.
