Friday, February 3, 2012

App Review: Catch

This week I am sticking with note taking and organizing apps and reviewing Catch.

Grade A

Quick Pitch: Catch is a note taking application that allows you to create notes based on text, photo, and audio. It also has features that allow you create a reminder note for task or calendar use. Catch allows you 70 MB of storage for free, sharing options, and up to three "streams" to organize different categories of notes into.

Full Story: Catch is a great application. It offers extreme control over things like syncing, privacy, views, and tags - the options and ease-of-use of the settings are seldom matched in Android apps. Sometimes options like these can feel overwhelming, but Catch has the Settings Menu laid out in a way that even novice smartphone users will find logical.

Like it's competitors, Catch is built to cater to many parts of our diverse lives. As a professional note taking app, it's solidly built. Via the widget or the app itself, users can quickly jump to note creation options like text, photo, and voice. There is even a QR scanner built in to quickly add URLs to notes. One missing link was the options for text formatting with no bullets, numbered lists, or bold/italics/underlining here.

Pros:

  • Settings - As mentioned, these are slick, you have great control over how the app acts.
  • Widget - A solid 4x1 widget for your home screen that allows you to quickly start notes, great for getting an idea down and not taking up a chunk of time.
  • Simplicity - The entire app is well designed to make sense the first time you use it, you won't find yourself hunting for a feature or menu you saw earlier, or a way to access a note.
  • Free - The 70 MB of free storage is great for notetakers. Like it's competitors, this number sounds "light", but in reality isn't much of a restriction for most users.
Cons:
  • Text editing - This won't bother you for jotting down quick ideas, but if you're into writing more detailed notes with formatted text you'll find this app lacking.
  • Limited Streams - Catch limits free users to three streams to organize their notes into. If your brain typically organizes notes into more categories than that you'll find yourself having to convert over to tags - which Catch does well enough to make up the difference.
  • Aesthetics - While the simplicity is to be praised, the app might be a bit too clean. The basic graphics and simple colors leave you with an impression that the app is cheap. While the features prove that impression wrong, it's still a hit.

You can download the app from the market here

Note 1 - This is a review that I wrote after giving Catch some extensive use for a short period of time, unlike my Evernote review I haven't tested the app outside of the Android application as I tested it for purposes of review.
Note 2 - I intentionally didn't compare the app to last week's Evernote in this post. I'll be covering another note-taking app next week and then putting together a comparison of the three after that.

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