iPad Looking for an app to organize personal projects

[FlorenceArt]

Hi All,

I have been looking for an app to help me organize and follow small personal projects, such as preparing for an exhibition or planning my next holiday.

What I need is very simple, but the important thing is that I want to be able to take notes, make lists and organize files in one place.

There are many good note-taking and list-making apps. The one I use is Awesome Notes HD, which is far from perfect but enough for my needs, except for one thing: the attachment function is limited to photos/images from the album, sketches drawn within the app, and maps. I would like to be able to store other files such as PDF or MS office docs, or even e-mails (well, I can copy and paste from e-mails so that's OK).

I found a number of likely apps but they are a bit expensive, so I'd appreciate input from people who have used them. The apps I found are Tap Forms, Bento, and OmniFocus (by order of price from cheapest to most expensive). Of course, maybe there are others that I missed...

Any tips?

Thanks!

[david_e]

I would suggest Bento 4 and its partner iPad app. With the desktop app you can custom design what you want and sync it to your iPad. If the do-it-yourself route isn't for you (it's very easy, drag-n-drop) there are lots of pre-installed templates and a collection of user submitted templates available at the Bento website. You might find something close to what you want and then just make a few adjustments, add or delete a few fields, instead of building completely from scratch.

If you haven't already, get the try-me version of Bento and see if it will work for you.

I have not used Tap Forms so can't comment on it. I did experiment with Omnifocus a few years ago and found it to be nothing more than a glorified and expensive to-do list. Updates to the app may have changed this, but based on that experience alone I would never buy an Omni-x product.

Hope this helps!

[FlorenceArt]

Thank you David!

I already have an app from Omni Group on my Mac, it's called Omni Outliner and I have been using it for years to make to-do lists. I'm not sure how much more Omni Focus offers though, and it's rather too expensive for the use I would put it to I think. I thought about buying Omni Outliner for the iPad but well, I'm not sure how well syncing between the iPad and Mac version would work. Plus I'm not sure I could attach external files to a list in the iPad version.

Good suggestion about trying the Mac version of Bento, I may do that.

In the meantime I bought a cheap app called Next! I paid 0.79 € for it, I don't know if it's the regular price or a special Thanksgiving offer. At first sight I hated it, but I tried some more, finally figured out how to edit an action (the interface is extremely confusing at first) and type a note, and I think I'll keep using it for a while. At least it seems to cover my basic requirements: notes, to-do, file attachments. The interface is obviously optimized for a small screen and on the iPad, at least half of the screen surface is simply not used, which is rather frustrating. If they ever make an interface optimized for the iPad, this could become a good app, depending on how much they sell it for.

I was even able to find a convoluted way to read an attachment I received in .docx format, which I can't read on my Mac or in the iPad's mail app. I opened the attachment in Goodreader (this app is really useful for so many things) and sent it to Next, and now it's attached to my project. And readable

[gwynevans]

I'd suggest taking a look at SpringPad, which combines an iPad app with a "place in the cloud", as it syncs your notes, etc on the ipad with the web-app. More info at http://springpadit.com/how_it_works & http://blog.springpadit.com/2010/03/...ad-iphone-app/

[baumgar]

Remember I used one call xx note or something. Just search note on iTunes.

[stonetools]

recommend to do

[FlorenceArt]

Turns out that the solution to my need may come from a completely unexpected corner: handwritten notes! I would never have thought to try that, but last week-end as I was searching for productivity apps, I chanced on a Thanksgiving promotion for an app called Noteshelf. It looked neat and was cheap with the Thanksgiving discount, so I bought it out of curiosity, never thinking I would use it for anything useful.

It's probably a bit too soon to tell if it will become of my indispensable apps, but so far I like it very much. It doesn't do any of the things I would expect a note or to-do app to do, but if you look at it another way, it does all of those things and more. You can create as many notebooks as you want, write in them (of course, that's the main point), copy photos in them (which is a substitute for the attachment function I was looking for, in fact this could work on other apps too: just make a screen copy of your file and import it in the notebook). You can reorder your pages, move them from one notebook to another, duplicate them, delete them. You can also group your notebooks (only one level of grouping is allowed).

Obviously there is no text search function, no reminders for late tasks, none of the "smart" functions all those real notes/to-do apps offer. But I am starting to realize that maybe I don't need those. Maybe what I was really looking for was a way to organize my thoughts and remember them, and maybe the best way to do that, in my case, is to simply scribble in a notebook.

I have been using notebooks for years. I have a big one for work where I write several pages a day. I have another one at home where I write much less often. I have long carried a small leather organizer thingie with loose leafs and note pages and scraps of paper in it. I gave it up a few months ago after getting the iPad, but I sometimes miss it when I want to look up a note I've been carrying with me for years, or write down a thought or a shopping list.

Can Noteshelf replace all of these? Not all, but maybe some, maybe even most. Time will tell.

[david_e]

Glad you found something that may work for you. As you are experimenting with a notebook type app I would suggest you check out Notebook by Circus Ponies. I've used the Mac app for several years and enjoy it very much. They do have an iPad version but I haven't used it yet so can't comment on it's usability.

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by david_e

Glad you found something that may work for you. As you are experimenting with a notebook type app I would suggest you check out Notebook by Circus Ponies. I've used the Mac app for several years and enjoy it very much. They do have an iPad version but I haven't used it yet so can't comment on it's usability.

Thank you, this does look like à very good and extensive app (expensive too by iPad standards). I wrote it down in my notebook in case I feel the need for a better typed note taker app (Awesome Notes is cute but more a toy than a tool).

[pagansoul]

There's Pocket Informant. You can get it for the iPad, iphone or Kindle Fire. I don't remember how much it cost but it does go on sale from time to time. I got my Fire version for free this week.

[FlorenceArt]

Update in case anybody is interested: I still love Noteshelf and use it every day. I tried a few other handwritten note taking apps but this is the one I prefer, even if it lacks a few functionalities such as being able to bookmark pages or add typed content or vector shapes. It's simple and robust and I love how it looks.

I also bought Notes Plus, which has lots of great exciting functionalities but feels more like a beta or even alpha than a stable and usable products. Plus it doesn't look as good as Noteshelf

Since I am in a spending mood, I'm also toying with the idea of getting Notebooks for iPad which is supposed to handle many kinds of attachments, including MS office documents. The reviews are contrasted, it seems you either love it or hate it, so I'm still hesitating.

[kyteflyer]

Have you looked at ThinkBook? I have it but since quitting work don't have a lot of use for it, so have not actually experienced it, completely. It works like an outliner I guess, and allows expansion as you see fit.

Its not desperately expensive
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/think...421926271?mt=8

[FlorenceArt]

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

Have you looked at ThinkBook? I have it but since quitting work don't have a lot of use for it, so have not actually experienced it, completely. It works like an outliner I guess, and allows expansion as you see fit.

Its not desperately expensive
http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/think...421926271?mt=8

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm pretty sure I have come across this one before, but I didn't buy it at the time, though I don't remember exactly why. Maybe because it doesn't seem to allow importing attachments. As I mentioned in my first post, this was an important requirement to me, though maybe I'm putting to much importance on this. It looks good though, maybe I will try it.

In the meantime I bought Notebooks for iPad, and I have to say I like it very much so far. It's simple, the interface is clean and nice looking (very important for me), and it does import attachments, I tried it with a .docx e-mail attachment and it worked fine (but I imported the attachment via GoodReader because the Mail app doesn't like this format).

It has a very simple structure based on notes and books, a book being a collection of notes, and you can create books within books so the structure is relatively flexible. I like that you can create a note, type a list in it and then split it, each line of your list becoming a new note. You can set up a book as a to-do list, and in this case each note in the book becomes a to-do item with a due date and a status (in progress, done, canceled).

[panda53]

I'm a fan of Evernote. The premium version syncs across mac, iPhone and iPad. You can add notes anywhere from the internet, and then sync them to your devices, can clip pages or sections of web pages.

Regards,