Some Initial Thoughts About Proxymind

I mentioned that I’d be beta testing the location-aware GTD iPhone app, Proxymind, in the next couple of days. I’ve just started playing with it, but I’d like to make note on some of my initial thoughts on Zykloid’s newest application. Before I do, though, I wanted to give a quick explanation as to what Proxymind is.

The basic concept behind Proxymind is that lots of GTD/to-do list applications exist for the iPhone, but no application makes good use of the location-aware abilities of the iPhone. With that, Proxymind aims to prioritize items based on location rather than importance. I think this idea makes a lot of sense as it allows users to do items or run errands that will take less time based on the distance an item is from the current location. Here are some of my thoughts:

Negative

• It seems somewhat tricky to figure out at first glance. For example, it took me a minute to figure out how to view the driving directions in Maps. It’s not super complicated, but the button is in a weird location. Also, clicking the Location inside of a note, a new screen appears which is a little complicated. Nothing super difficult, but there’s some stuff that may be able to be labeled better.
• The application is somewhat slow in loading various things. I didn’t use it for very long, but it crashed once. Unfortunately, for an application to crash once isn’t very uncommon since 2.0 came out. It is a bit slow, though.
• As far as I know, there’s no way to uncheck an item after you mark it as completed. The check mark icon is in a fairly obvious spot, but I can’t find a way to uncheck anything. There’s got to be a way to do that.
• Something else I don’t think is possible to do is to find the location of an item from Maps. You can add the location to a note by entering the address manually or by choosing the current location, but I don’t believe you can drop a pin on the map in a location that you want to set the note at. I feel like this would be a valuable feature.

Positive

• First off, I think the concept is great. It really makes a lot of sense to prioritize items based on location, particularly when you have a short time to knock out some items on your to-do list and can’t drive a far distance.
• The fact that it measures the distance from the phone’s current location rather than a set address is perfect in my mind. If I’m somewhere and finish one task early leaving me a couple of extra minutes, I want to know what items are closest to where I am so that I can hop on over and get something else done really quick. This app is ideal for something like that.
• The Focus idea is genius. Allowing users to create filters makes so much sense. The app makes use of tagging and filtering to add labels to items in order that they might be more easily categorized. I really appreciate the way that is done.

As a whole, there’s not really another app like it. I’m assuming since the beta is currently by invite only that the app will eventually cost a couple of dollars. At this point I’m not sure I’d be willing to pay much for it since I don’t think I would have much use for it. Living where I do, almost all of the errands I have to run are within 10 minutes of my house. I could, however, see the value in something like this. Ideally, this would be a feature in a more well-rounded application rather than an application devoted solely to location-aware GTD, but at the same time Proxymind does a good job with the Focuses in categorizing items. I’ll probably discuss it a little more later, but hopefully my initial thoughts were informative.

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