Dream Planner: A Short Review

I took advantage of the Dream Planner app sale, and well, I'm not very impressed by this app. It is a thoughtful layout, one of the most attractive I've found, but I think it just lacks some core features to make it worth your time. There is no syncing functionality, which would be useful to enter in detailed plans with many tasks. I don't see many people opting to do so using their just two thumbs on the iPhone's tiny keypad. The nice progress tracking charts aren't very useful without an ability to prioritize tasks by importance. Overall, it's worth 5 minutes and 99¢.

One of the two impressive features would be the bar charts that shows how you are using your time  progressing through tasks. What I mean is that the progress bar feature is partitioned by real progress, but how many check marks you've made and how many are left to go. So for example, if you have a dream that requires 10 tasks to complete, if you complete 1 task, the progress bar will advance to 10%, so on and so forth. It's a metric, but some tasks will require more time and energy than others making the measurement somewhat inaccurate.

The second feature is a pie chart that shows you how you spend your time  manage your tasks. Without going into the math, if you complete more tasks in one area, it'll be representative in your pie chart. Again, not indicative of the time or energy you spend, but rather the number of tasks, regardless of their importance to actual progress. In the picture to the left, 33% of tasks were made in the maintenance category and 11% in the finance category. It could have been the tasks in maintenance took 10 minutes on a laptop and the tasks in finance may have required a week of dedicated work flying to Sweden and back to finalize your off-shore accounts. So again, the data is too misleading to be of any use.
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Dream Planner is a fun little app if you have the dexterity (and several hours) to put all your tasks for all your dreams into one app using just the iPhone's keypad. After all that work, tracking the goals would be fun as the visual feedback is one of the best available. However, it's really just another task list with some added bells and whistles. It's one of a kind, but it didn't remain on my iPhone for long.