Creating a TODO app is a software engineering trope. I think every software engineer feels the need to create their own at some point or another.
But in the end most engineers that I know end up using a plain text file. I was one of those people for a while, using Window’s Notepad as my TODO app.
However in the last few years I’ve found myself using Apple’s Notes app more often due to a few key features that it offers.
Automatic syncing
Having a note automatically sync between my phone a desktop saves a good chunk of time, especially when I don’t have my phone on me when get on my laptop.
Admittedly the Notes syncing is not great, especially when editing the same note on both my phone and laptop. I also find myself quitting and restarting the Notes app on my laptop any time that I need it to get changes I made on my phone.
But the syncing functionality that it offers is better than having to email the .txt file (or its contents) to myself in order to sync it across devices.
Draggable list items
Sometimes I want to reorder list items, particularly when I want to plan the order of completing my list. With a plain text file, that means cutting and pasting (often with some reformatting involved). With Notes, you can drag and drop list items.
The drag and drop behavior is a bit buggy, especially when dragging past the current displayed screen size, but it works most of the time.
Checkbox lists
I used to use plain bullets for my lists, removing each item as I went. But sometimes I wanted a record of each item I did when I completed them. When that happened I would manually replace the - with a X to indicate the item was completed without deleting it. But that’s a hassle.
In Notes you can use a checkbox list instead of a bulleted list to give each item a checkbox to indicate done or not.
Multiple notes
This is minor, but Notes makes it easy to have and switch between multiple notes. I have one note that I use for most of my day-to-day tasks and a separate note for my “when I can get around to it” personal tasks.
Shared notes
My wife and I recently had a daughter! One implication of this is that we have very little time to do anything, including communicating to each other what we need to do.
We’ve started using a shared Note with a running tasklist. It’s easy to add to from our phones and keeps us organized to make sure we don’t miss something that we need to do that day.
Conclusion
I’m not an Apple fan. Notes itself has even more issues than I listed above.
But at the end of the day the Notes app is the right amount of usefulness without so many extra things as to make it a hassle to use. It’s a hangover from the Jobs era of Apple.