14 DAY TRIAL // Unifiq has released Aspire, a useful tool for people with many aspirations and goals. Although not a daily task manager, Aspire gives you the big picture, so that you spend time on what's important, according to its maker. The application is visually pleasant, allowing you to get a better view of your priorities.
Unifiq stresses that most people keep their long-term plans in their head, while smart people know how to get ideas out of their head, which makes it easier to keep track of them. This is where Aspire jumps in to save the day, by providing a visual workspace to help brainstorm, review, and improve your life's goals and priorities. In conclusion, you're “smart” to get Aspire.
The app is simple to use and is visually appealing. You add boxes with your “goals,” and assign “obstacles” to them, to know what you can't do right now and why. Basically, this is what the app is for - showing you the problems that keep you from fulfilling your dreams.
So, what you do is assign “solutions” to them. Solutions are a different set of boxes. With all this information in front of you, you can magnify, minimize, move, mark, schedule, and do all kinds of tasks with your goals, to better see what's keeping you from achieving success in one or more areas. The app borrows a lot from the Expose feature in Leopard, just to give you an idea of how it works and looks.
Other preferences include highlighting goals to achieve in a specific time frame, or goals that have common solutions or obstacles tied to them. You can attach notes as well, which let you get things out of your head, but ensure all your ideas, inspirations, references and resources are right there when it eventually comes time to start working on an item.
“More than ever before, with all the economic and other craziness, I think now is really a time where a renewed focus on long-term goals is a very good thing,” says Mark Roseman, the developer of Aspire and founder of Unifq. “So I'd invite you to please check out the website, view the short screencast, and download Aspire to try it out for yourself.”
We're going to let you give the verdict on the usefulness of this new Mac app. So, go ahead, download Aspire, try it out and let us know what you think. The trial version is good for a whole month, and lets you create 50 items. The full version of the app costs $19.99 to buy. It requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later and is a Universal Binary.