Note taking whilst on the move should be simple and effective. Well, that’s what I want anyway – one quick and easy way to quickly jot down a note and then have it saved for review later. The developer for Take-a-Note kindly gave me a sneak peek into his new app recently, and it was a pleasant experience.

The whole concept of Take-a-Note is to keep the process easy, efficient and effective. There’s no abundance of screens and menus to get involved with, just open the app, press the button to record some audio or type in some text and press ‘OK’. Take-a-Note will store the note, assign it to an appointment in your calendar and even fire off a reminder at a set time to review them. Notes can be assigned as individual events, or digested together so you are only reviewing one item in your calendar.

Take-a-Note also stores the location of the note, which can be handy at times for me.

Take-a-Note costs £0.69 from iTunes

The Good

Take-a-Note is clean and efficient. I like the straight forward nature of this app. Your in and note taking within a second. This is great if you are on the move and need to capture a note quickly. The audio works great on the iPhone and recordings are clear and audible.

The ability to set the preferences to automatically start recording when the app is started is also very useful, allowing you to cut out even more clutter and tasks.

The daily digests and notifications are also very useful. Especially for me when I am out and travelling. I can record notes after phone calls and thoughts and them review them before the end of the day. You never know I might get to a point where I don’t forget something.

Areas for Improvement

This app is all about simplicity, so maybe there’s little room to improve. Personally though I would like to have the ability to correct my appalling spelling when typing notes; which is not possible in this release.

Secondly, it would be handy to categorize notes into sections at times – so I could split work, customers and personal and have a digest for each category to review at the end of the day.

Thirdly, whilst the entry into the diary is a great feature, there’s a disconnect with the audio. Obviously I record a snippet of audio against a note and that gets saved on the iPhone. However when I am reviewing my notes, the URL to the audio only works if I am reviewing them on the same iPhone. It doesn’t work if I am reviewing my notes on my desktop’s calendar. Maybe syncing your audio notes in the cloud would be a nice solution.