Organizer+ Bundles Your Calendar And A GPS Task List Into One App
Organizer + ($2.99) by MorrisCooke is a calendar and GPS task list bundle for your iPhone.
Life is hectic, and we end up having tasks that need to be done in certain locations, among other events that we need to take care of. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all of this in one convenient app? Well, now you can, thanks to this nifty app. Meet Organizer+.
When you launch Organizer+, you get a brief introduction screen. The app will fetch data straight from your default iOS calendar, so if you don’t have that set up already, you should do that first. Whenever the app is syncing data with the native calendar, the gear icon in the top left corner will be spinning, so you are aware.
Organizer+ will display your calendar events in three different views: List, Day, and Month. Those that like Week views will have to wait for the next update, as the developers are already working on implementing a week view. You can quickly jump to the current day with the Today button as well.
The List view will display a list of days, with any calendar events in color-coded chunks next to a time slot on the left-hand side. The nice thing about Organizer+ is that it will display icons to represent the type of activity it is, who you’re going to be with, and an icon to show that there is an attached location (if applicable).
Day view will be like the day views that you’ve experienced in other calendar apps, and icons will also show (though they are a bit scrunched up). Month gives you the entire month at-a-glance, with days that have events being marked with a triangle in the corner. If you tap on a day, the events will appear in the space below the calendar, similar to that of what you find in the List view.
When you tap on an event, you can view the full details. What separates Organizer+ from other calendar apps though, is the fact that the Who, What, When, and Where are laid out in front of you in an easy to read format. If something is off, you can also edit the details.
When creating a new event or editing an existing event, the layout is a bit different from what you’re normally used to. At the top are four squares: time, event type (icon), person, and location. You can tap on these to edit them manually, or you can type out your event in natural language in the text field underneath – this will cause the squares to automatically update themselves as you type. You can then chose the calendar to add the event too, set up alerts prior to the event, make it repeating (every day, week, bi-weekly, month, or year; no custom options), and add any additional notes.
While this implementation is neat, I did encounter some problems. For some reason, when I was entering in a time such as “6 pm,” the time square stayed at 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. I had to manually edit the time square myself, which defeats the purpose of the natural language entry. I’m not sure if it is a glitch or if I was just doing something wrong, but I hope that this won’t happen again in future updates.
The person field is also a bit limiting – it can only have one contact from your address book. So if you are meeting with multiple people, you cannot show them all, just one. It would be nice to see the ability to add multiple people in the future.
In addition to being a calendar, Organizer+ allows you to do GPS-enabled tasks by simply going to the Tasks view. Creating a new task is as easy as typing it out in natural language, and the four squares at the top should be updated as you go (beware of any glitches though, so check to make sure everything is correct). Any events that you create without dates will also end up as tasks. You can choose which calendar your tasks should sync with, when you should be alerted, toggle repeating tasks, and add any notes.
Tasks will be organized by priority, though you can drag them to reorder them. When you near the specified location, the app should give you a notification of your task or event.
In Preferences, you can change your default calendar, colors and visibility, activities, and some additional settings. The additional settings include the option of being shown past events in List view, how many future/past months should be displayed, and the distance measurement unit (miles or kilometers).
If you still need help with the app, there is a handy help guide to using Organizer+.
I found that the event and task creation can be a hit or miss. While inputting a task, Organizer+ would not read the location, and instead put “4 pm” as the location because I prefaced it with “at.” It also repeatedly crashed on me when I would attempt to input a whole time, like “4:00” – this occurred twice. I want to see the natural language input improved in the future.
I would also like to see these tasks be able to sync with Reminders on iOS 5, since this seems like a duplicated feature.
In the end though, Organizer+ has a lot of potential. It is two solutions in one. It just needs a bit more polish before it can be ready for primetime.
