iPhone App Reviews

Organizer

Chris J. | Mar 21, 2009 Productivity

User rating: (6 votes, average: 3.50 out of 5)

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Some apps are easy to review. They either do or don’t do what they claim to do, Organizer is a little more difficult to explain. In many ways Organizer has more in common with a drawing app than most organization apps. Confused? Me too, but I’ll try to explain.

To start with, when you look at a page in the app, you see what looks like a page from a datebook. The numbers and lines you see are purely a background image, which means that you can write over them as you want. On the other hand, they do not help in terms of guiding where in the day your activity may be happening. Depending on personal preference, you might see this as a good thing or a bad thing.

Text is inputted in text boxes, which can be placed anywhere on the page. You have a few options for the font, color, and size of the text. Once the text box is on the page, you can move and rotate it wherever you want. Being able to rotate and move text is nice, but I can’t really figure out how that will keep me organized (maybe someone else will know).

You can also add pictures, drawings, icons (emojis), and import contacts from your Contacts app. Any of these can be moved, rotated, shrunk or expanded to fit whatever you have in mind. Again, this might make for a good looking page in my Organizer, but I’m not sure that this will really help me stay more organized. In trying to experiment with the app to really use all the features, I ended up with something that looked more like a scrapbook than an organizer.

One nice feature is the Cut, Copy and Paste buttons. If you want to have the same thing appear on more than one page, or if you want to move something, simply Cut and Paste. On the down side, you can only copy one thing at a time, so if you need to move text, a picture, and a drawing it could take a while. Being able to group items when cutting and pasting would be helpful.

Most apps of this type will give you the option of an alarm when an appointment is imminent, but with Organizer it would not even be possible. Since there is no way for you to input the time anything is to happen any more specifically than the day, even if the option was added the app wouldn’t know when to alarm.

One more thing this app does need is better directions. When first starting up, the instructions are included on the current day’s page. If you want to access them after that you have to flip back to that day. A button that would allow access to instructions at any time would help the learning process.

For most people, I think that this app is probably not useful enough to justify the price. There are some out there who I am sure will put this app to good use, and if you are one of those, good luck. The app is certainly well built, it just wasn’t built for everyone.

Tags: $6.99, Chris J.