Chicago Sun-Times columnist and fellow Bostonite Andy Inhatko gave a glowing recommendation for ShoveBox in Tuesday’s episode of MacBreak Weekly during the “Pick of the Week” segment.

You can hear the discussion at 1 hour, 18 minutes into the podcast, or listen to the relevant excerpt here.

I’m psyched about this because MacBreak Weekly is one of the podcasts I most look forward to hearing every week, along with TWiT, Skeptic’s Guide, and Dan Carlin.

Not to mention that Leo Laporte is someone I’ve watched ever since I was in elementary school and he played Dev Null on MSNBC’s The Site.

After some jokes about the name from other TWiTs (if someone could explain these to me, I’d be grateful), Andy spoke about ShoveBox’s design and user interface:

It’s the solution you want to use if you want something that works more like a system enhancement — rather than ‘I’m going into Yojimbo-land to file this thing.’ The central fulcrum of this is a little menu item — a box with an arrow on it.

So if you’re on the web, or in a document, you can simply drag a piece of text and it gets added to the list if things you’re keeping track of. If there’s a picture on Flickr, drag it into the drop box. If there’s a file on your desktop, drag it into the drop box.

… It’s designed to be very simple, direct, very tactile.

Leo seemed to be oddly but flatteringly impressed with the app as well. “Geez Louise! … What a find! … This is what I’ve always wanted!”

They also discuss the “Rules” feature and its potential. I’m glad they did, as often I feel like I’m the only ShoveBox user who takes advantage of it. This is one of those neglected features that I’d love to expand on.

One weakness mentioned is ShoveBox’s lack of synchronization features. This is a failing I’ve been working hard for the past couple months to address. I hope to post more on this soon — but in short, I’ve built a synchronization engine that initially will work only with the upcoming iPhone version of the app, but is written in such a way that it can be easily applied elsewhere.

Leo remarks about the vast proliferation of worthy organization apps on the Mac, and the tendency of many users to habitually use several of these at once. Andy jokingly suggests someone write a “sorter” app that decides which organization app to file something in.

Oddly enough, this was the original idea for ShoveBox. It was going to soley consist of the menu icon, the Rules interface, and Quick Jot — no real storage or organization features to speak of. But I quickly realized that it would be difficult to sell something so abstract and well, meta.

So I built some decidedly-bare-bones organization features as well, so that people less dorky than me could immediately find it useful. And now it’s taken on a life of its own.

In any case, it’s a decent discussion that I couldn’t be more honored to hear. They raise many interesting points, positive and negative. Be sure to let me know what you think, though — I’m always looking for feedback and ideas from users of the product to steer its future development.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 3:14 am and is filed under Media Attention, ShoveBox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.