One of our modern challenges is keeping up with the things we really want to spend our time on with the huge amount of digital content that is available. Sofa is a sharp iOS app that aims to solve this problem with a simple yet customizable hub for organizing movies, TV, music, books, podcasts, apps, games and more to check out in the future. Along with the arrival of a new sofa update today, we took a closer look at the free iOS app.
We’ve all probably tried to keep a basic note or reminder list on the iPhone with things we want to watch, listen to, read or experience in the future. The sofa, created by Shawn Hickman, is built around the idea that this approach quickly becomes confusing and inefficient, and a dedicated application designed to organize content offers a much better experience.
In a new update released today, Sofa 2.13 gained the option to add apps, audiobooks and board games. Other useful additions are automatic backups to iCloud Drive, new export / import options, 11 new themes and the option to copy direct links.
Sofa practice for iPhone and iPad
The sofa uses a really clean and simple UI, built around a single home page. The upper part features “The Stack”, which is a place to save things quickly or keep them in mind / organize later. Below it, you have a block for “Activity” and, beside, “Themes”.
Below the top section, it is in “My Lists”. The standard list includes: apps, audiobooks, board games, books, movies, music albums, podcasts, TV shows and video games. You can tap the + icon in the middle on the right to quickly add a new list or start organizing your lists into groups.
As shown above on the right, it is also easy to edit an existing list by tapping the… icon in the upper right corner. You can switch from the grid view to the list, change the classification, edit the name, or delete the list.
One UI option that makes the app very convenient to use is the floating + button that remains in the lower right corner, whether you are on the main screen or in a list.
Sofa built great integration with services like Apple Music and App Store (as well as others for books, movies, etc.) to extract images, details and more. One thing to keep in mind: you need to tap on “search” before you see the results appear (without automatic suggestion in the search).
It’s easy to add content and choose which list you’d like to put it on. There are even quick links to open content like apps and music on the App Store or to Listen on Apple Music.
When it comes to managing content while checking things out, you can tap the icon … next to any item on your lists to “Mark as done”, “Register and keep”, “Move to …”, “Copy deep link “or” Delete. “
Themes, widgets and more
Sofa is a beautifully designed free app and does not use ads. Shawn offers a number of themes to support development. There is an interesting mechanism to view any of the more than 70 themes for 30 seconds in the entire application before returning.
You get a classic light, dark and black theme with the free version with other themes ranging from $ 0.99 to $ 1.99. You can browse the range of themes by creators, times, places, colors and seasons.
Other important touches include several sofa app icons to choose from, iOS 14 widgets that can be customized to show a specific list (small, medium, large) and automatic sofa backups enabled (syncs with iCloud Drive).
Finishing the sofa
I found that the sofa is a delight to use. It has a clean, thoughtful and intuitive UI, fun customization options and no ads. It’s a great experience to organize your personal media inventory and more that you’d like to check, as well as keeping an eye on what you’ve read, watched, heard, etc.
There is no downside to trying the Sofa, as you are getting the full set of features with the free version and can support development by choosing some of the custom themes for just a dollar or two.
I strongly recommend downloading the Sofa for iPhone / iPad and trying it out.
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