attitude

CARROT – the To Do app with mood swings

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Recently updated with more moods or something. CARROT – it doesn’t stand for anything, the maker just got caps lock stuck for a bit – rewards you for doing your To Do tasks.

And punishes you for not doing them. The punishment is all in the form of sarcasm, which I like, and bits about displeasing her, which I’m a little uncomfortable with. It just speaks to a certain type of relationship that appeals more to a certain type of man than I am. Especially as the command to backup your To Dos is to say “back me up, girlfriend”.

But, still, think of CARROT as that English teacher you had. The one who scared the life out of you yet for that life of you, you can’t understand how. None of the other teachers were that good.

And let’s look at the rewards because they are what make CARROT sing, I think. When you first get CARROT and you enter a few tasks, that is about all you can do. You can’t fiddle the list about to put it into a new order, for instance. Not until you’ve earned the right.

You earn the right and you earn points by ticking off To Do tasks. Now, the first thing I would do is add in tasks like “Do whatever”, “Tick a task off”, “Lsfdjfsdjkfsdfu” and tick ’em as done until I got whatever points I wanted.

But that’s me. You’re far too nice to have thought of that.

With more tasks done come more rewards in terms of features. CARROT will never be all that powerful but this earning new features is clever: it’s both a reward and a way of avoiding you being swamped with detail at the start. You’ll more appreciate and you will more understand features like getting CARROT to work with Siri if you build up to it.

I like all that. But features are only one type of reward and I don’t know what to call the other, far more numerous type. As an example, though, at some point when you’ve done enough tasks, CARROT will say you’ve earned a kitten and let you name it.

I’m having difficulty picturing this working in OmniFocus.

But I do like another reward, which is an ongoing story – and the latest version of CARROT, just released, includes an inch more story for you to get.

If it’s not powerful, CARROT is at least lively and that’s no bad thing.

CARROT is available on the App Store for iPhone for £1.99 UK or $2.99 US.
See more on the official site and have a look at the CARROT promo video – which includes a very HAL 9000-like look for when you’ve made CARROT unhappy:

I’m surrounded by fools

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How to figure out whether or not you are a right jerk:

To discover one’s degree of jerkitude, the best approach might be neither (first-person) direct reflection upon yourself nor (second-person) conversation with intimate critics, but rather something more third-person: looking in general at other people. Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks? Are you the only competent, reasonable person to be found?. . .

Are You Surrounded by Idiots? Real Talk: You’re the Jerk Not Them, 99U (26 June 2014)

Read the full 99U feature for more, but then stop. The piece and that quote above is actually from a much longer article that 99U is excerpting and it’s one of those cases where the excerpt is better than the whole shebang.