3 Basic Features for a Productivity Application

There are a great many productivity applications for Mac, the web, and iOS. By productivity applications, I mean all those that take part in the information-management workflow; that is, they are able to generate, store, and organize information. They range from applications for taking notes or processing text to those used for organizing images or planning events and projects.

The fact that they are productivity applications does not mean they are work applications. Their purpose may be to support a hobby or recreational activity, but the common denominator is that they make it possible to do things more productively. One example is iTunes, which makes the handling of music, video, book, and even application files more productive by allowing those media to be organized, classified, searched, and moved. This subject catches my attention because all of us use productivity applications in one way or another, whether for work, planning personal projects, to-do or shopping lists, storing and reading books or graphic novels, and so on. Thinking about the productivity applications I use most and like best, I have discovered that the best productivity applications bring together three basic features:

1. Synchronization: This feature allows us to synchronize our information among different devices or instances of the application, such as a Mac, an iPad, an iPhone, and a web service. The more automated and frictionless the synchronization is, the more productive the application becomes. The best applications are those that do not require the user to synchronize manually; it happens unnoticed whenever there is a change.
2. Standard formats: If information is stored in standard formats, it will be easier to share or extract from the application, and continued support for those formats is also assured. Some examples of standard formats applications use to handle information are txt, html, gzip, jpeg, and png. In the case of audio and video files, there is a great debate because the standard formats are not open formats, but the most common ones in which I would prefer to store my information are mp4, mp3, flac, mov, and aiff.
3. Export and extraction: It is very important to be able to extract information from the application so that other applications can read it. For example, some applications allow their data library to be backed up, but it is stored in a database format that other programs cannot interpret. With applications such as iPhoto or Aperture, the libraries can be opened to extract the images without needing the application. Another wonderful case is Evernote, which allows notes to be exported in html format, which can be read by multiple applications.

Having these three features gives users the assurance that:

• they will have the information they need on any of their devices,
• the information can continue to be used in the medium or long term regardless of whether the application still exists,
• they can remove their information at any time without losing it when they stop using the application.

A great piece of advice is to always look for these three features in any productivity application you buy. Otherwise, you may end up like so many PC users who can do absolutely nothing without Microsoft Office; they depend on the application to access and use their information. This almost unthinkable reality is more common than people believe and leaves users completely dependent on developers and the support given to the application.