Over the past 3-4 months, I have been working hard crafting the first version of Attune. To celebrate launch, I want to tell you what I love about Attune. Yes, you can check out the Attune website and learn about the features and the roadmap for Attune. But I wanted to specifically tell you what I love about Attune and why I use it regularly. In fact, I use it so much that I have nearly twice as much data as anyone at Pancake Technology or in the beta program.
1 – Notes
Most task applications severely constrain what you can do with text. Most of the time, the notes/comments field is secondary to the application, almost like it’s tacked on at the end as an after thought. The problem is that most of the time, the first stages of organization are inherently free form. I find myself over and over again starting off projects with just general thoughts, maybe some informal bullets in the text. Even the later stages can benefit from descriptive text.
For me, being able to create these notes as the thoughts start to flow and later use them in the context of a more structured project is huge. This has always been a huge gap in most task applications. Since notes are items just like everything else in Attune, you can take your notes and relate them to as many task or projects as you desire.
This is something we are going to greatly expand going forward. We love products like Evernote that let you capture rich content from almost anywhere and remember it. That’s why “notes” is the first integration point we are working on.
2 – The Flexible Structure of Attune
Attune’s ability to link any item as a child to any other item allows for incredible power in organizing your space. Productivity apps have long enforced a strict hierarchical structure on users. Tagging systems have helped a little to alleviate this issue, but they are far too informal to be effective. Attune, on the other hand, works much more like the web than a strict hierarchy. On the web, the same page can be linked from anywhere it’s relevant. You didn’t have to copy it to a new place and try to keep changes synced across all the copies, you simply pointed to the original.
In much the same way as the web links pages together, Attune links items together. You have one copy of your note that can be linked from anywhere else in your Attune workspace to put the information at your fingertips whenever you need it. Attune’s use of drag and drop makes this linking super easy and intuitive.
3 – Attune is Fast
This isn’t on the official feature list for Attune, but thanks to a fast native front end and a fantastically fast database running in the cloud, Attune is very responsive. It feels like the data is local on the user’s machine instead of hosted in the cloud. You just don’t notice it aside from an occasional network issue. And it’s no secret that responsive apps are much, much, much more pleasant to use.
What’s more, there are changes coming in the future that promise to make it even faster. As we roll out to iPhone and iPad, we want Attune to be lightning fast over 3G. It’s going to be beautiful.
These are my favorite features of Attune, what are yours? Be sure to leave a comment if you have one!
Attune. Keeping you in tune with everything you need.
If you want to know more about Attune, check out the website, or if you want to check it out in the Mac App Store, you can always just…
