Taking notes and managing tasks can be a full time job. For many of us, the competing worlds of work, home, school, and hobbies can threaten to overwhelm all but the most organized among us. Unfortunately, not many of us (myself included) have the time or mental energy to create a system from scratch, forcing us to rely on software designers’ ideas about task management. There are a ton of apps out there to manage notes and tasks, but none that do it quite like Projectbook, an iPad-only iOS app available in the App Store now for $1.99.
Projectbook stores your notes and tasks right on the iPad, leaving its core features out of the cloud to reduce the need for continual connectivity. The devs want to allow you to use this thing at home, at the office, on the subway, and out in the woods, I assume.
The natural language technology pulls related notes, documents, and to-do lists together, relating them based on an analysis of the text contained within them. There’s no need to impose your own organization scheme on the notes or tasks, nor do you need to create folders to sort things into topics, though you can. The developers are planning on adding iPhone and Mac syncing this fall, when they make the apps for other platforms available.
You can type your notes in different fonts, create outlines, use your own handwriting, sketch, record audio, or take photos from within the app itself. All of these are connected automatically, letting you concentrate on gathering information rather than organizing it. Project book allows you to import pages from Instapaper and Pocket, or files from Dropbox. You can also email PDF, HTML, or text versions of your notes to others.
Projectbook is on sale now for $1.99 in the App Store. Let us know if you try it out!
Source: App Store
Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he’ll really appreciate it.
6 responses to “Rethink Productivity With Projectbook’s Natural Language Technology [iOS Tips]”
not available in the UK store – strange, for an app like this to be US-only
You aren’t missing anything. The App is total crap. After shelling out the $1.99USD I get the privilege of watching it crash anytime I try and create4 a note, a task, or do anything other than look at the initial UI. The marketing is extremely well done – the app, however, is not.
From the Developer: The only issues being reported from users that are consistent with Mr. Nelson’s crashes are from users who are running pre-release Beta versions of iOS 6. Mr. Nelson– If you are not running iOS 6, please contact our support team so we can resolve whatever issues you have.
From Developer: Projectbook will release in UK this fall. We wanted to take the release step by step so we can provide good support for each region.
When calling an app crap it would be nice to know that you have tried to resolve the issue with the developers before calling it crap. If you are indeed running IOS Beta 6 and you are getting crashes then you should retract your statement as you are running Beta and should have known better.
I have not downloaded this program but I was reading about it. I read the comment about the app being crap but nothing that I would have thought would follow such as I called support and they couldn’t resolve my issues or what version of OS you were running, etc.etc.
Projectbook is most definitely NOT crap.
I have been evaluating it for the last couple days and I have had not a single crash.
Evernote has been king in this space and Projectbook right out of the gate makes them look lazy.
I have been a paid subscriber and heavy user of Evernote for years and after only a short time with Projectbook I am seriously considering switching. I expect Projectbook will get only better in the coming months, whereas Evernote has been stagnant.
Evernote has always been more of a memory dump than a productivity app and trying to use it otherwise is an exercise in futility. I’ll keep Evernote, drop down to the free plan when my subscription expires and use it to collect junk, because thats what it does best. I’m ready to move on to something with more capability, one that makes my workflow work, and Projectbook does that.