Seeking some app advice.

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Bobby Parker
Feb 16, 2019 at 07:33 PM

Hi all,

I’ve read this forum for years, while my partner and I have been developing an idea of a note-taking/white-boarding/informational-management-style application. We both suffer from ADD, and I’m constantly losing where I leave information & notes, source code, etc. (I am a software engineer). I drift off into space in my head, like all the time, and lose track of what I was doing, if there’s a noise, or whatever, text-messages (I disconnected my house phone, because: Just. no.), whatever I had going on, I can lose nearly instantly.

I was really thinking about creating a modern version of the mighty EccoPro (I know. It’s a fevered, sweaty dream isn’t it?). Ecco could do so many things to make my life easier by the simple expedient of very easy & fast capability to *quickly* organize tasks and things ON ENTRY I needed to keep track of. I have many issues with current search systems, and I find myself getting quite frustrated with the limitations of expression I encounter in so many applications I’ve tried.

At this point, it seems I must admit my real problem: I hereby humbly admit that I…have a problem, and it’s name is CRIMP.

It’s not that EcooPro being abandoned really hindered me. I knew how to keep it running. What got on my nerves, is that I eventually kind out of outgrew it. It’s lack of actual feature advancement, is its only real problem. I have a copy of it on my laptop now. I was still using it, up till last November. I keep my personal copy of the zip file I’ve extracted it from to put on SOOOOOO many machines in Dropbox, for fast access.

In my search for things to just make my life easier, I discovered this PDF which very neatly outlines where I need support: http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/infoneeds.pdf

My CRIMP, underwent a distressing mutation. It became Compulsive Coding In Pursuit Of Lofty Goals (boy, there’s a disease you don’t want).

I built a lot of prototypes, and I’ve read through this forum trying to glean a general idea of the tools and techniques people use to track things.

That turns out to be really hard. New apps come out all the time, with incremental new features, some of them pretty fabulous, and they’re trying to solve problems from differing perspectives. Some of the app feature threads here date back years, with updates every so often.

It’s conceivably impossible to solve all of these problems with one tool. I might be crazy for even contemplating it. (I’m a software engineer. It’s like, they encourage us to be ‘innovative and creative’, but then people look at us funny)

I realize that there are many ways to solve problems. What I’m seeking, is more an understanding of the underlying problems that face people who, like me, suffer with the various forms of ADD/ADHD, but have also derived processes that enable to work past it, such as I have.

Back to topic list