Have Your iPhone Summarize Things For You With Trimit
trimit ($0.99) by Frimby Limited will summarize and condense any text you put in it for use on specific platforms with a certain length.
This sounds like a good concept, but how well does it actually work? If anything, I'm more impressed with the visuals of the app, but in terms of functionality; it's cool, but not very practical.
Upon launching the app, you get a brief tutorial of how the app works. The basic idea is this: get a link to some thing you want to share with people, paste it in the link import in Trimit, and then you will get an extraction of the text that was in your link.
The app can generate a summary for you at a certain length, and this is activated by shaking. Trimit will use shortcuts like "2" to represent "to" in an effort to trim down summaries and make it easy to understand at the same time.
There are essentially two views in Trimit: Editing and Mode view.
In Editing View, you get a text field that you can write in. It looks fairly reminiscent of the areas that most Twitter clients give you for typing up tweets. While you can type out something to share, that's not the point of the app.
The first step is to grab a URL, perhaps for an article that interests you. Tap the "Link" button and import the source, and Trimit will begin extracting text. You'll get taken back to the Editing screen, where all of the text from the link is pasted in.
Once you have this text, the next step is to have Trimit summarize it for you. Before you "Shake to Summarize," go into Mode View by tapping on the icon with the gear.
Mode View gives you six options for summarizing: Twitter (140 characters), Facebook (421 characters), 300 characters (an iPhone text message), 550 characters (email message), Tumblr (700 characters), and 1000 characters.Tap on any of these icons to select the mode, and then go back to the Editing view.
Now you can put Trimit to work. Shake it to get an automated summary of the text you extracted from the link in the character limit you specified. At the end of the summary, you can also insert the original link as well.
When you have the summary (with some edits of course, because it will never be perfect), the Share button at the top will have some options for you. You can Tweet it, Facebook it,, SMS/MMS it, email it, print it, or save it as a .txt file (accessed through iTunes File Sharing). If you choose to save something as a text file, it can be viewed in the Settings of the app (the top left icon).
To repeat the process with another link, you'll have to clear out the old text first. While I tried just selecting all the text and deleting it, it seemed to come back, mixed in with the new text. The only sure way to get rid of it is by pulling up the screen to reveal the "Pull to delete" message, which uses that gesture that we've all become familiar by now.
While I find the idea of Trimit to be neat, I'm not sure this can find a place in my daily routine. Normally, if I like a link enough to share, I can easily come up with a brief summary on my own.
In fact, I would even say it's easier to do that than to use this app, since there are a lot of steps involved. The visuals of the app are nice, but the overall use of the app is very niche, and in the end, not very user-friendly (so many steps are involved!).
If you are truly too lazy to summarize things on your own, then Trimit could be for you. It's just that the feeling isn't the same if you share something that you didn't really come up with.
Trimit is available at an introductory price of $0.99, and will eventually move up to $4.99.
