I don’t use Awesome Note for iPhone ($3.99) all that often, but I’ve kept it on my iPhone for almost a year because it just looks so damn good. It’s also a heck of a lot more powerful than most people probably give it credit for, especially now that to-do support has been beefed up.
Like most other note apps on the iPhone, Awesome Note (a.k.a. aNote) provides different folders and an app-wide search to help you keep all of your information organized. I’m not talking about lists or thumbnail views of notes either. Any folder within the app can be viewed by date on a monthly calendar, turned into a great little journal with Diary View, and much more. In short, if there’s some obtuse or quasi-contortionist way that you like to view your information, aNote probably has you covered.
Version 5.0 has stepped things up even more with the addition of tags and drag-n-drop task support. Users have been able to turn any note within aNote into a task since v2.0, but it’s really only now that the GTD system within this app has hit its stride. One quick tap on your grocery list will turn it into a to-do item, and a quick tap-and-hold will let you simply drag and drop it onto a pre-set due date. Tasks within aNote even feature their own push alarms, so you really are free to use this app as a full-fledged task manager if you want to.
The only major limitation of the app, as I see it, is its poor syncing capabilities. I don’t expect aNote to have a Mac or PC client to sync with, but I’m still unsure as to why its Google Doc and Evernote syncing still take so bloody long. I keep a journal folder of about 48 notes within aNote and it takes about 10-20 seconds for it to complete a two-way sync (and that’s a manual sync — still no option to sync upon launch or exit). I was also a little disappointed to see that tags set within aNote don’t make their way back to Evernote, but I guess that’s understandable, since a tag system that would somehow work with both Evernote and Google Docs would probably be more trouble than it was worth.
Finally, iTunes backup in this update is appreciated, but I’d like to see something more interesting, such as sync between the iPhone and iPad versions of aNote (which are separate apps, by the way), in the future. I’m hoping to pick up an iPad 2 at the end of this month and am starting to think about what current Mac <-> iPhone tasks can be accomplished as iPad <-> iPhone instead, and Awesome Note could really fit the bill for notes and tasks if it could just improve its synchronization.
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