[ n e t t x t ]

Link to Jorte on the android market

Price: Free

My score: 8 out of 10

Description:

Jorte is a free personal organizer that actually does it’s job well. It includes a calendar feature as well as a tasks feature. Both have the option to sync with your Google calendar and tasks.

Details:

Jorte comes with a calendar feature as well as a tasks feature. This is nice, but what makes this great for me is that both the calendar and the tasks have the ability to sync with your Google calendar and tasks. The calendar feature is great in this app. It is very clean, not cluttered, and gets the job done. Weekends are depicted with different colors to easily navigate your busy schedule. Jorte includes tons of customization options including font sizes, days to display, calendar display type (agenda, weekly, daily, etc), and many more.

I love the fact that I can also sync my Google tasks with this application. A manual sync option is required in order to update changes from the app to Google and vice-versa though which is something I don’t like because the Calendar function of this app does not require a manual sync. Another issue I noticed is that there is no option to indent tasks under other tasks. If you access your tasks list via the web, you have the option to do this. If you do so, and sync with Jorte, the app recognizes the indent but you cannot do it within the app. It only picks it up from Google to Jorte syncing.

The most recent version of Jorte updated the widget options with an easier way to add them. Now you can pull up the widget options and the first thing you pick is the widget size. Once you have chosen this, you then choose which Jorte widget you want to add. You can choose from the following:

• Tasks
• Weekly
• Agenda
• Daily

You can also customize the style of the widget with eight different color options. This is great if you are like me and don’t like to add widgets that cover a nice background image. I usually pick a style that will match the background as well as a font that will pop so it is easy to read. This works great with another option the widget offers: transparency. You can choose between a few presets. I personally added an agenda widget that spanned 1 column and 3 rows. I added some transparency and picked a style that matched the background image colors and the result was a great view of my upcoming events without getting too much in the way of my background image.

The agenda option of the widget is one of this app’s strong points. I usually do not have many items in my calendar from a day’s stand point. But I do have many days in a month where I put events into my schedule (friend’s birthday on a weekend, project deadlines during the week, etc). The agenda option displays all of your upcoming events on the widget beautifully. The first line in the agenda display is always going to be the current day. It will display whether you have something scheduled that day or not. It’s a nice feature because you can use that to determine the current day. The following lines (as much as the widget can fit based on the widget size you picked) will display all of your upcoming appointments. The app will do so by grouping them by the month. Here is an example of what it may look like:

March
1 [Tue] 9:00pm Favorite TV show
5 [Sat] 8:00pm Friend’s Bday

April
1 [Mon] April Fools!

It makes it VERY easy to glance at your home screen and determine your schedule for the next few days, weeks, or months depending on the type of schedule you have. If you want to see more, just press the widget and the app opens up into the current month view and you can look for your specific appointments from there.

Pros:

• Fast
• Clean design/UI
• Many customization options for the app and widgets
• Syncs with Google Calendar and Google Tasks

Cons:

• Tasks functionality needs to include more options which are available via Google’s web UI
• Need to select manual sync option in the app to sync with Google tasks
• No option to indent tasks under others within the app. Must be done on the web GUI then sync with the app to have it display that way in the app.

Final words:

Overall I think this is the most useful app I have and would be lost without it. Prior to this, I never kept track of anything and always felt lost or that I was forgetting important appointments. Now that I can fully integrate with Google calendar and use the great looking agenda widget, I have found myself adding EVERYTHING to the calendar, including when my favorite shows are on. If you have tried other apps and found they seem to fall short in one area or another, or are just starting to look for a great organizational tool that can do it all, and look great while doing it, then Jorte is definitely for you.