Notes & ToDo Review – Can organising tools be too complicated?
App Type: Uncategorized
Our rating: 
By: Luo Xu
Version #: 1.0.3
Date Released: 2011-09-21
Developer: Luo Xu
Price: 0.99
User Rating:
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A key facet of organisational and ‘To Do’ apps is that they are supposed to simplify the many events of everyday life into an accessible and memorable format. Of course, if they’re too basic, then you may find that you’re actually better off without them (see AudioTask), but can an organisational app actually be too complex?
Notes & ToDo certainly begs this question, as the amount of options and intricacies you can tinker around with is initially overwhelming. There are several screens from which you can access information, and not a single one of them is a good old-fashioned calendar. Instead, you browse your list of things to do by cryptic symbols or tough-to-navigate option screens.
The app has an unnecessarily over-elaborate presentation, with options to label your notes using strange symbols and the option to manually add such information as the weather and temperature to your notes. You can also add photos and star ratings to your notes, as well as protecting them with passwords. Once you get to grips with it all, you realise that it’s a fairly intricate organising too, but surely the idea of such apps is that they’re user-friendly and instantly accessible, rather than something that an MI5 agent would find handy?
Among its orgiastic excess of features, there are a couple of useful ones. If you’ve noted down an event or appointment, you can instantly send it via text or e-mail to people in your iPhone contacts list. This is particularly useful for people in charge of a small workforce, or for those who find that creating events on Facebook is a little too personal.
Notes & ToDo also integrates Google’s location services into its set up, and while this in theory could be useful, it does not work on my iPhone. This app is a well-presented and potentially useful organising tool, but it’ll definitely make you question the idea that such apps are inherently simple and user-friendly. But if you are patient, and enjoy being meticulous and detailed when organising your life, then you may find some use for this.
Quick Take
Value:Medium.
Would I Buy Again:No.
Learning Curve:High - bit too intricate for an organiser tool.
Who Is It For:People who like to be meticulous with their notes.
What I Like:Option to send your notes and events to your contacts.
What I Don't Like:No 'calendar view' and too many options.
Final Statement:A detailed - and sometimes cryptic - app for notes and organisation.
memo Features:
• Note record
• TODO List
• You can invite members, and send them information, especially when the alarm fires, that makes you share task and memory really handy.
• Set map postion, and check on map.
• Set multiple alarm notifications.
• Include images
• Use passcode protect your each messages.
• Add other informations, like temperature, weather, etc.
• Logo base category, easy to manage records.
• Many more other cool features.
How to use it:
1: Main Page
The main page displays 5 views for 5 ways to display all your notes/todos: summary, logos, nearby, latest item, and priority. You can use these 5 methods to locate the note/todo you want to find quickly.
And there are two more buttons on this view: create new note/todo and configuration.
2: Note/Todo Details View
Here is the place you do your main work about your note/todo, which has two modes, edit mode and read mode. In read mode, you cannot change the content of the note, including the logo, weather, temperature, create date and time, location, people, alarm and time, and the priority, and the image attachment. But you can change the background, and you can check all the information and you can do actions like sending SMS, sending email to anybody or to all the people invited in this note/todo. In edit mode, you can modify everything.
? Content Area
This is the main part on the paper, where you can type any characters you want, and we provides numbers of special characters for you to use to make your content more informative, and you can pick some frequently used special characters to create a list just on the keyboard. When you have done you input, click the arrow to hide the keyboard, all information that you input will be saved.
? Location
Set or view location for the current note/todo by clicking the icon of the landmark on the right. If you are in the edit mode, you can edit the location, select a location on the map, and if you are in read mode, you will see the map with a landmark if you have saved one, if not, you will be told you that have not saved the location yet.
? Alarm and Date
The note can be a todo, if you have set the 'Due date' information. If you remove the 'Due date', the todo will becomes a note. And you can save multiple alarms for your note/todo, and you can assign a repeat interval to each alarm based on the date and time of the alarm. For example, if you set the alarm at friday 3:00 pm and set the repeat interval to 1W (1 week), which means every friday at 3:00, it will alarm you. And other repeat intervals are: 1D (1 day), 1W (1 week), 1M(1 monthly), 1Y(1 year), and of course you can set " not repeat ", so the alarm only alarms once.
? Invite People Management
No matter you are writing a note or todo, you can invite people and manage them. You have 3 methods to add people:
Add new people and input his/her name, number and email
? Lots of other information to set
3: Passcode configuration
Passcode configuration is quite like the system passcode configuration function, where you can set a 4-number passcode, or change it, remove it.
? Create Passcode
? Modify Passcode
? Remove Passcode
Thanks! WOD Soft Studio.
Screenshots
Article By Robert Zak
I'm an up-and-coming freelance writer (or so I like to think) specialising in film, apps and gaming. Aside from writing app reviews on what sometimes feels like a mass scale, I've also contributed work to The Independent and IGN.com, and am on the writing team of the popular Lifestyle blog, WhatCulture.com. Like what you see? Follow me on Twitter @Rob_Zed and get in touch!
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