Repost from Kernel Panic

I’ve been looking for a great list app on the iPhone since, well, since I first bought the iPhone 3G when it launched in here in Japan. I’ve tried a lot of list apps. I tried using GTD apps like Things and then Omnifocus for keeping lists, not tasks, but lists without much success. When I say lists, I’m not talking about to-do lists that I’m constantly acting on. I’m talking about games I want to buy, movies I want to watch, albums I want to listen to. These things can be kept in a heavy duty GTD system like Omnifocus, but after trying that for six months, I came to the conclusion that having a list of games to play (which all take quite a while to play through) is overkill. Instead, I went looking for simple list apps to handle these kinds of things. I tried Quickie, which is good but it doesn’t sync. I love the interface to Purchases for shopping lists, but it doesn’t sync. I quickly realized that I needed a list app that syncs.

I routinely check the iOS App Store’s productivity section for new apps. That’s when I found “Listary”, a list app that integrates with Simplenote. It creates and manages lists not by using the native list function in Simplenote (cause it sucks) and instead uses tags to append a “Listary” tag onto every list the app creates. You can also import any text file that already exists in your Simplenote account. You could also use the Simplenote iOS and web apps to add or remove the “Listary” tags.

Listary formats notes very simply. A line break creates a new list item, and completed items are moved to the bottom of the note with an open line above them and prefaced by a backslash and a space. This simple format allows for easy editing of lists from even the Simplenote iOS app, web app or a desktop client like Notational Velocity. I’ve found this great for adding things to grocery lists from the Mac when before I was using the wonderful (but unable to sync) Purchases for iOS. By using Simplenote as a conduit, I can type up huge lists on the Mac and have them appear on the iPhone.

There are a couple limitations that I hope get corrected, but I fear they won’t. There’s no parent-child function in Listary. I mean, you can’t have sub-lists. You could easily fix this by implementing markdown into the list formatting. Something as simple as a “#” preceding a string of text could start a new sub-list and then every line of text until the next “#” or even a line break could be part of the preceding sub-list. My feeling is that Listary wants to be simple and the addition of sub-lists might seem overly complicated. At the same time, if you use “#”s to create sub-lists, most people would never run into problems.

I’m very happy with Listary. It creates very readable lists that sync over the air using a system that is very popular and free. It’s a better implementation of lists than even Simplenote itself could create. (You couldn’t make a worse list function than Simplenote created already anyway if you tried.) Listary goes for $1.99 and you can buy it here.