CMU School of Drama


Friday, January 11, 2013

A Streamlined Collaboration App, Built For Smartphones

Co.Design: business + innovation + design: My wife and I are planning a dinner party. There are countless apps to make grocery lists and discover recipes, and I can make to-do lists in Reminders while following every task through a spreadsheet in Google Docs. But there’s no great way to do that elusive task on my phone--to really brainstorm--while putting the plan together.

2 comments:

Akiva said...

This app sounds pretty good. When I'm done doing my comments I play to download it and try it out for a little while. The way the app is described "Catch starts with the media, then makes the message the attachment" really reminds me a lot of Google Wave. Wave was a collaboration tool that combined video sharing, photo sharing, word processing, commenting, email and many other similar tools that we use everyday in to one tool. By not making a distinction between messages and the attachments that they contain allows us to see that the content is the most important thing. The UI of Catch really seems to allow the user to focus on collaboration. The fact that Catch is not totally free (the number of spaces is limited) makes me like this app much less.

The reason most people have never heard of Google Wave is that it never took off because people couldn't get their heads around what that program was all about. The idea was to far ahead of it's time. Perhaps the time is ripe for Catch but maybe it will meet the same fate as Google Wave.

I hope that at some point a program like this will really make it big, because I think it will be greatly useful in the theatre world for collaboration on production ideas and tasks.

Jason Lewis said...

I just downloaded this app and I plan to check it out because it seems quite useful. I've always had a problem with keeping my ideas organized and put together during the process of doing something so maybe this will help that out. The features that are on it seem to really help with putting things in order with phrases and pictures and other such things. Also, being able to share it easily or have a hashtag to let people search it makes the app seem even better because now someone can see what you're idea was without having you figure out a way to share your idea while explaining and creating this chaotic way of telling someone your idea. I really like the sound of this app and i hope it really hope it works! Can't wait to find out!