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With all the hustle and bustle of daily life, and the iPhone’s knack for making anything more convenient, it’s no surprise that there are many apps devoted to task-management: to-do lists, calendars, and the like. Here are five of the best of them:
Task PRO
Price: $1.99
For: iPhone and iPad
Task Pro from AlifSoft usefully syncs with the iPhone Calendar automatically. Each event you create is added to a list, which can also be viewed in the iPhone Calendar format. You can create new lists and add as many tasks as you want to each list. For example, you could create a “List” for title “Move to San Francisco.” Then, you would create smaller tasks such as “1. Register address change. 2. Pack things. 3. Board flight.” You can tag events as “Personal,” “Work,” “Important,” or “To-Do.” One point I thought could use improvement was the use of “Task Due Dates” rather than allowing users to create events that last for a period of time.
Agenda Calendar
Price: $0.99
For: iPhone and iPad
Agenda, from App Savvy, syncs with the iPhone Calendar as well as another app on this list, the Week Calendar App. You can toggle between viewing by hours, days, weeks, and months by swiping horizontally across the screen. The most notable feature of Agenda is its “Status Taps.” This is a way to quickly email or text someone by clicking on the event at hand. The name comes from the three pre-written statuses—“confirm,” “here,” or “late.” These are ways to rapidly text message or email someone to communicate when you are coming to an event. But you can also text them your own message from the app. You can enter the address of an event, and enter contacts from your iPhone Contacts list. When viewing the event, you can then tap the address of an event to get directions, or hold or tap on phone numbers to text/call.
Week Calendar
Price: $1.99
For: iPhone and iPad
Not only does Week Calendar sync with Agenda, it has many of the same features, including address-finding and starting calls. However, Week Calendar from UtiliTap has an interface that, much more than the other apps on this list, resembles a conventional weekly planner. I think this is a great feature; it makes the app more visual, and allows you to create events that last a certain amount of time—rather than having a single “Due Date” or “Due Time.” You can see that time as blocks of color on your screen. You can toggle between viewing hours in a single day, or weeks, or months by double tapping the screen, or by clicking on the “eye” icon on the bottom left of the screen.
Awesome Note
Price: $3.99
For: iPhone and iPad
Awesome Note, by BRID, comes with eleven standard folders covering basic categories of daily life, such as “Shopping” and “Work,” so you can organize your life in more ways than chronology. Not surprisingly, Awesome Note comes with a calendar, which syncs with the iPhone calendar. On the home menu, it has a small sticky-pad icon called “quick memo” on which you can jot down ideas quickly without categorizing them. You can then stick them in a folder later as needed.
Organizer for iPhone
Price: $7.99
For: iPhone
Organizer, from Aesthology Inc., has perhaps the most flexible interface of the apps on this list. Similar to OneNote, you can type and insert pictures anywhere on the screen. You can also insert voice recordings for audio memos, or draw by hand using a paint-brush tool. Organizer syncs with the iPhone Calendar and your contacts. Unfortunately, the hours listed in a day contain only 4AM to 11 PM, and events are not shown in “block” format as in Week Calendar. That said, its flexibility means it can function more as a notebook if necessary, in addition to being a planner.