Awesome Note lite version is limited to a maximum of seven notes and no syncing, but it’s a fair demo version that shows you most everything else that the full version has to offer. The app combines a gorgeous note-taking UI with some basic task management features, theoretically offering you the best of both worlds in one Awesome package.
Normal note stuff
Awesome Note is primarily a note-taking application. You can throw a picture into a note, but the UI is really built for text. Text comes in two flavours: memos for quick jots, and notes for more serious writing endeavours. Memos are kept in a category all their own on the main screen of the app, and you can turn memos into notes when you think the quick scribbles are worth saving. Notes are organized into folders of your choosing, and you’re free to email them, lock them down with passwords, and do most anything you’d expect a decent notebook app to do.
Awesome themes
A really big part of what makes Awesome Note so, err, cool, is the great selection of themes (11, to be exact). In the older versions of the app you had to tap on the theme button at the bottom of a note to toggle through each theme in sequence. It wasn’t the best way to go about selecting themes, since tapping the button one too many times meant another trip around the theme circuit just to select the one you actually wanted. The newest version of Awesome Note addresses this issue by showing a small, scrolling pop-up. You simply scroll through the thumbnails of various themes and tap on one to select it. There’s no need for a preview function, since the theme applies instantly.
Orientation Lock, Full Landscape support
The main screen of Awesome Note features an orientation lock button right at the bottom of the screen. This is important, since the whole app is landscape capable. This really should be standard.
To Do lists
There are two ways to turn a note into a To Do. If you’re in a folder view, you can simply tap on the note icon (it’s a slip of paper) beside the name of a note to convert it into a task. If you’re already viewing a note, you can simply tap the “task” button along the bottom of the screen.
Tasks are fairly basic in Awesome Note, but definitely usable. A To Do can have a due date (using a rolling date picker), and the app icon shows a badge when tasks are overdue or due today. The great thing about the app is that you can keep both notes and tasks in the same folder, which makes a lot of sense to me. What isn’t quite as easy is managing all of that information.
There are three views that you can choose within a folder: thumbnail, list view, and To Do. The thumbnails are handy because they provide a preview of a note, the list view is what you’re used to seeing in most note apps, and the To Do gives priority to tasks. There are other filters within each view so that you can sort notes by creation date, due date, name, etc. What I really miss, however, are the task-specific views I’m used to in specialized apps like Things or 2Do. If you get really into task management, you tend to write most everything down as a possible task, and it gets cumbersome very quickly to see all of your Awesome tasks at once. The completed tasks don’t seem to disappear (unless you delete them), and tasks due six months from now appear beside the ones due tomorrow (what I need is some sort of “today” or “this week” view).
Conclusion
I couldn’t test everything from the full app in this lite version (there’s Evernote and Google Docs sync in the full vresion), but I believe I’ve played with it enough to make a decision about whether or not I want to use it. It’s hard to really criticize the app’s task management right now, since it’s a fairly recent addition to the app, but there was one thing that felt abundantly clear throughout my experience with Awesome Note 2.7: even though I’d like more filters, views, and features at my fingertips, I’m not sure where those extras would fit in the UI. There’s just too much awesome packed into too little space. There are non-standard sized iPhone buttons everywhere, and there are so many options for a note that you have to press a “more” button to see them all.
I still love the basic design of the app – so much so that I keep coming back to the lite version every few months to see if I finally want to buy it. Now that I’ve tried it, I think I’m ready to once again declare that I won’t be using Awesome Note – at least not version 2.7. The interface still needs to be a bit cleaner before I can be really enjoy using it. In the meantime, I’ll just ogle it from afar.
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Awesome Note Lite is free on the App Store. The full version of the app is $3.99.
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TAGS: note app, note taking, notebook, notes, tasks, to do
