As the name implies, Awesome Note (+Todo/Calendar) ($3.99) is an awesome iPhone app for creating to-do lists, calendar entries, and notes. Of all the personal organization apps on Apple's mobile devices, Awesome Note is one of the most visually compelling, letting users choose which colors, background images, fonts, and icons they want to use in their notes and to-do lists. It's a treat to play with all these options, plus the app's graphical calendar, while also being highly productive—all of which helped this powerful app become an Editors' Choice.

The app offers more than enough to justify the one-time price of $4. You can sync Awesome Note with an Evernote or Google account, letting you view and edit your notes from multiple places. Want a passlock? Just turn on that feature. Need to keep a variety of different lists and notes? No problem, as Awesome Note gives you different folders to sort all the different tasks in your life appropriately. If you're seriously looking to become a more efficient task master, Awesome Note is the one app you need on your iPhone.

 

Essential Features

The creators of Awesome Note (+Todo/Calendar) put together a well-designed interface for their list-making and note-taking users. After you first download the app, Awesome Note sets you up with a handful of sample folders and notes. These pre-loaded notes contain information about using Awesome Note, so while you're figuring out how to access the content, you're also learning how to use the app. But you don't need to read much to figure it out, as the experience is highly intuitive.

Anytime you fire up the app, Awesome Note brings you to a screen with a preview of up to five folders of your choosing, with more folders available if you swipe right to left. You can change each folder's  color, title, and associated icon. A number on the rightmost side of each folder indicates how many notes or to-dos are in it.

The virtual folders are used to sort your notes. As a compartmentalized person, I especially love the use of folders in this app. I have a folder for personal to-dos (pink), work to-dos (blue), one for a running shopping list (orange), and even one called "Food in the House" (green) where I log my list of perishables so I remember what I have on hand whenever I have a few moments to do some meal planning. It beats the heck out of staring at an open refrigerator, or worse, trying to remember what I already have in the fridge when I'm at the store. I also keep a plain text note in my "Food in the House" folder for planning meals for the week.

Dive into a folder, and Awesome Note gives you two options for creating new notes: type them immediately into the text field at the top to create a quick note or task, or select  a plus symbol at the top right to open and edit the note's full details, such as due date and reminder alarms. Visually-oriented people will appreciate all the options Awesome Notes provides in terms of folder and note customization. Colors, icons, background images, themes, typefaces, and even virtual paper stock can all be changed at any time. Every note automatically contains a title and creation date, but Awesome Note stores plenty of additional information, such as due dates, alarms for the due dates, and a priority level (indicated with stars). These aspects come in handy when you want to sort your notes by highest priority or due date.

Awesome Features

One of Awesome Note's indispensable feature, the calendar, gives users multiple ways to view what's due and when. Like the rest of the app, the calendar was designed with visually-oriented people in mind. It's features like the calendar view and all the other customization options that separates Awesome Note from lesser to-do apps like Clear (99 cents, 2 stars), Carrot (99 cents, 2.5 stars), and even Microsoft OneNote Mobile (3 stars, free). With Awesome Note, you can set alarms to ring before an event or at the time it's scheduled to occur, and you can set up repeating alarms, too. Awesome Note even has its own selection of wonderful audio cues so you'll never confuse them with your other ringtones.

Among the other essential features that make Awesome Note well worth the very fair price are: 1) two-way syncing with Evernote and Google; 2) wireless data transfer to any Bluetooth device; 3) Wi-Fi enabled backup/restore to a computer on the same local network as the iPhone; and 4) the ability to lock individual folders.

Take Note, It's Awesome

Among task managers and to-do apps, Awesome Note (+Todo/Calendar) is a clear Editors' Choice. Awesome Note gets right everything you'd want in a to-do list app for the iPhone. I'd like to see the app add iCloud to its list of syncing options.  Expanding to Android, Windows, and Mac OS X and and offer syncing among these platforms would also be a big improvement. It's hard, however, to ask much more of an app that gets everything else right.

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