I love list apps. I buy far too many of them, and half of the time I wind up just leaving them in my iTunes app library, not even on my phone. I see the difference between task managers and list makers. Things and Omnifocus are task managers. There are due dates and tags. There’s a conscious bit of thought being paid to getting things done. List makers make lists. And that’s fine. I refuse to call TaskPaper a task manager. It’s a list maker. A damn fine list maker. Probably the best one of there. But I can’t see trying to manage all my tasks, long-term and short, in TaskPaper. It’s as if everything is a next action. You can’t hide things from view. There’s a weird grey area in between these two types where apps like Dunnit! live, where they provide tags and due dates, but all your tasks are in one big list. You can’t manage things long-term without the app feeling cluttered. Lastly, there are checklist apps. You don’t feel like you’re tracking tasks. Just making lists. Pocket Docket, for iPhone and iPad, is a checklist app. It sits in this role of a “things I need” not a “things I need to do” app. Like I need to buy games or books. Groceries. Things I need to pack. That kind of stuff.

It’s a cleanly designed app. Its strong point is how fast you can add a whole bunch of items. The entry field sits at the bottom and you hit the plus button to add the item to the list, but it keeps the keyboard up, in the list view, and you can just keep on adding stuff. It lets you add notes, but no tags or due dates. I also like that the completion progress of each list is displayed in the main view as a sheet of paper that is being filled up with grey like a glass of water being filled up. There are no badges with tiny numbers reminding how many things you have to do. It gives you a sense of where you’re at without beating you over the head with it. It’s so far the best “checklist” app I’ve come across.

My one complaint is the way it’s been distributed. You can get Pocket Docket on both iPhone and iPad, but they aren’t in one universal binary. You have to spend $8 to get the both of them when TaskPaper is a more powerful solution for just two dollars more. I only bought the iPhone version, but from what I’ve seen of the iPad version, it doesn’t appear to add any features that the iPhone version doesn’t have. There’s no syncing between the two, so you’re paying extra to use a bigger on-screen keyboard. So I have to say the iPad version isn’t worth buying at $4.99. The iPhone version at $2.99 is a worthwhile purchase though. If you want a supplemental checklist app to go along with your main task manager, Pocket Docket is a good solution.