Clear – Review – Strike through all unnecessary clutter with this deceptively simple to-do app

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By: Realmac Software

Version #: 1.0.1

Date Released: 2012-02-16

Developer: Realmac Software

Price: 0.99

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“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler,” suggested Albert Einstein. “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in,” commanded Napoleon Bonaparte. These are but two of the many quotations on simplicity in activity that can be found in the hit to-do app of the moment, Clear. These randomly sequenced quotations appear every time you create a new list in the app. They serve as prompts to action — to simply do, which is after all the underlying philosophy of Clear.

Since the release of its demo video a few months ago, Clear has been touted as the to-do app that perfectly matches the iPhone’s vast accommodation for gesture-based inputs. Probably the most striking feature of Clear is its complete lack of buttons. This is a rather novel development in the crowded field of to-do apps, considering that some of the most popular ones have all sorts of buttons for executing all sorts of actions. Clear will have none of that, thank you very much. In a sense, Clear is comparable to the iPhone itself, in that the iPhone came at a time when mobile phones were, unlike it, proudly outfitted with numerous keys and buttons. Now, Clear does away with the apparent necessity of buttons and suffices itself with the capacious possibilities of gestures.

Opening Clear for the first time, you’ll be briefed through a series of tutorial cards that inform you of the basics of the app. The first thing you’ll learn is that items in Clear are sorted by priority. Higher-priority items are naturally placed above the lower-priority ones. A default heat map theme also aids in recognizing priority, with the topmost having the reddest hue. So, forget everything you know about contexts, due dates, locations, and all that jazz. You won’t be applying them here. There is only one thing you need to enter for a to-do item and that is the item itself.

After the tutorial cards you’ll be taken to a sample list that doubles as an on-the-spot how-to of sorts. By performing the action in each item in the list you’ll learn that swiping an item to the right marks it as complete, swiping to the left deletes it, and tapping and holding picks it up for relocation. A couple of gestural shortcuts are also introduced for creating an item: simply pull down to create an item at the top or pinch two rows apart to create an item in between them. Pinching vertically shut, in turn, collapses the items and brings up the lists view, whereas pulling up performs the act that gives the app its name — that is, it clears the completed items.

There are, of course, more tricks to be discovered as you continually use Clear, including more gesture-based operations and special unlockable themes. You might also find a few quirks to be not to your liking, as I do the fact that tapping on the name of a list preps it for renaming instead of, as expected, just opening it. The lack of support for any syncing service also means that you can’t have the same sets of items across your iPhone and, say, your iPod touch. Be that as it may, even with missteps such as these, it’s quite clear that Clear is a to-do app that’s not to be perfunctorily struck through.