Yes, yet another todo application for the iPhone. Why bother? Honestly, I didn’t. I stumbled upon it in AppSniper and, since it was free, I downloaded it. What a stroke of luck! I’m using it for nearly two weeks now and I am more than pleased by the design and usability of this little productivity helper. It has all the features I want from a decent todo application.

• Detached todos
• Priorities for todos
• Search through the complete todo and project list
• Sorting of todo lists and projects. Can be activated by tilting the iPhone
• Quickly enter new todos by copying other entries
• Projects with separate todo lists, notes and contacts
• Automatic archiving of completed todos
• Different views on projects and todo lists with filtering for completed entries
• Sync with Google Calendar
• Nice built-in help

Personally, I do not need the syncing capabilities with Google Calendar, and I haven’t tried it. But it should be pretty straight forward. Just enter your credentials in the iPhone’s settings and tap the big sync button. Syncing seems to be an important feature for most iPhone users, therefore I added it to the list above. Most of you will be aware of the possibility of syncing your Google Calendar with desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook.

What is much more important to me than syncing is the start-up time and the possibility of quickly entering new todos. Also the search capabilities are important to get a quick status of my various projects. All these work perfectly in TouchTodo.

The possibility of organising your todos in projects is also a big plus of TouchTodo. I try to organize all of my todos in projects, since the most important thing for me is to bring my projects forward. I am not a big fan of the Getting Things Done method (GTD) as proposed by David Allen. For those of you following David Allen’s approach the Things application might be better suited, though I haven’t tried it yet.

TouchTodo is also a great complement to GoalKeep.

This application does exactly what its name implies. It works like a real baby phone. When your little one starts crying, BabyFon will call the number you have denoted in the settings. You can also define the sensitivity. This will prevent the application from causing a false alarm, when your baby just coughs or turns around in bed while sleeping.

In our homes we do have two sets of baby phones. One set is the best rated baby phone on Amazon, yet it does not work satisfactorily. Our dwelling is surrounded by other buildings which block the baby phone’s signal when we are farther away than 50 meters from our home. The excellent Italian restaurant is 200 meters away, though. No signal there. No such problem in the case of the iPhone with BabyFon running on it. Just start the application and lay the phone in the room where your baby sleeps. If your sweet little one starts to cry you will get a call immediately. You can listen and decide whether you need to rush home or can stay and enjoy your bruschette.

You need to make sure, however, that you divert incoming phone calls on the iPhone running BabyFon. An incoming call will interrupt BabyFon and you won’t get a call afterwards.

Did you know that the iPhone has a built-in scientific calculator? Just open the calculator and rotate your iPhone by 90 degrees into landscape perspective. You will see that your plain old calculator application has much more to offer. Just explore it and feel the difference.

This is exactly what GoalKeep is good for. Define your goal by writing it down and then check off each day whether you did something to reach your goal. After a few days you will see a chain of check marks in GoalKeep’s calendar view. You will be proud of yourself and this will give you the motivation not to break that chain.

I know this may sound a bit theatrical, but I think this little app really has the power to change your life. In the last weeks I succeeded in remaining a vegetarian. Moreover, I am exercising every day and formed other habits which seemed important to me. Though it is really too early to tell whether the success is sustainable, I wholeheartedly recommend this little app to you. It is well worth its price.

Here is how I use it.

• I open GoalKeep each morning and go through my life goals and plan the actions I want to take that particular day. This encourages me to go after my goals.
• Throughout the day I take my baby steps I planned in the morning.
• At the end of the day I add a little check mark to the chain.

As the app description states, it is really a great motivator to have a visual feedback and see what you have done in the past to reach your goals. 

And remember, don’t break the chain.

When you were writing SMS with more than four lines on the iPhone you might have noticed a little problem. With firmware versions 2.0 and 2.1 it was impossible to scroll up to the beginning of the message. This is fixed in version 2.2. Maybe this will convince you to finally upgrade.