As a Mac and PC system administrator for a large private school I’m often asked by teachers, administrators, and students to install new apps for evaluation.
One of the most common requests is for Mac and iPhone apps which take notes or manage todo lists and tasks. It isn’t often that we find an app that does both, and does notes and todo lists well, but that’s the affordable NoteSuite.
Notes, Todo Lists, Cheap
Notes and todo list apps are a dime a dozen on both OS X for the Mac and iOS for the iPad. Many are free; some sync nicely between OS X and iOS.
Teachers and students want a straightforward way to take and store notes– and track all the little goodies that cross our screens during the day.
That includes web pages, URLs, text snippets, documents, PDFs, photos, outlines, the all important audio notes, as well as Word, PowerPoint and other common files.
NoteSuite does all that and manages todo items and project tasks while not being cluttered with arcane tools or options buried deep in menus.
Todo items or tasks can be assigned a due date and an alert (with an option to add it to Calendar), and all the pieces sync up nicely via iCloud between Mac and iPad.
Articles from Safari, Chrome, or Firefox are easily stored into NoteSuite, as well as Microsoft Office files. Students will appreciate the audio recording capability, too.
Considering the nominal price tag (same for Mac and iPad), NoteSuite is a very good value for students and teachers on a budget.
The caveats come in two flavors. The first is that there’s not an iPhone version, though I see more students with iPads than iPhones these days. The second is that NoteSuite relies on iCloud for syncing between devices and iCloud often isn’t as stable or dependable as Dropbox.
