In the two years or so since we last looked at this app, it's been updated 17 times. That somehow seems fitting for software designed to keep you productive.
Pocket Informant 4.91 is for busy people juggling busy lives, and especially ones that revolve around both tasks and appointments.
It's meant to be the single app you need to carry around with you, as it includes To Do functions, plus Contacts,and an appointments diary kind of calendar. Back in 2014, we rather raved about this app, and how this universality was a good and big thing. Since then, it feels as if other apps have been catching up, and today we'd say there are few To Do apps that don't feature calendar functions, nor many Calendar ones that don't include To Do tasks. If you get the free version of Pocket Informant, we'd say that it belongs in the latter category: the free edition is more a strong calendar, with basic reminders.
Buy an in-app purchase to upgrade the app, though, and you can choose to make Pocket Informant dramatically stronger on tasks. Previously, there was one such in-app purchase called Premium, which got you all of the task features, plus a quite handy option to have the weather be displayed on your forthcoming calendar events. As part of the latest 4.91 version, that one Premium purchase has become several: the company calls it an
à la carte option, where you pick the parts you want.
It makes sense, and it's an interesting model financially, but it has the issue that it's of most use to people who already know what the different options do. Unless you've already used them, it's hard to know the difference between, say, Informant Premium and the Power Feature Pack. If you already know the difference because you've used these features, you've therefore got them, so you have no need to buy them again.
Fortunately, there is still that Premium option, which gets you the lot in one go. Plus, although it's optional, you can choose to sync your Pocket Informant data using the company's servers, and if you pay a subscription to do that, you get the Premium version of app thrown in. Get the Premium version: it's $15, and it's worth it.
With this full version, we'd say that Pocket Informant is equally capable and full-featured on both calendars and To Dos. That makes this quite rare, and if we tend to have more use for tasks than meetings ourselves, we reckon this is a killer feature for many people.
We said
similar things back in 2014, but we also said that there was a problem: serious productivity tools need both a Mac and an iOS version. At the time, there wasn't a Mac one, but there is now -- and that means you can do heavy-lifting work like forward planning and adding of many tasks or projects on the Mac. Then you can refer to it all, and top up, or amend, or even mark-as-complete tasks as you go. We haven't used the Mac one yet, but even its existence makes a difference: we'd recommend getting the main iOS version, knowing that you can add the separate Mac one later.
One reason for doing so is that there is enough in the iOS app to keep you busy. It is feature-laden, and replete with myriad options that you can customize. That always sounds better than perhaps it is: this is an app that you grow into, and the more you realize you want, the more you find in it. The free version provides a kind of on-ramp that gets you into it, but perhaps because we're task-obsessed, we'd say that if there were some way to give us more To Do features in that, it'd help. We're not honestly sure how that could work, though, as Pocket Informant is built to work with various To Do methods, including Getting Things Done, and you can't slice off bits of those, it's the whole task methodology deal or nothing.
While we came to change our mind, Pocket Informant at first felt cramped with how much it includes on its screen. As with everything else that is customizable, the defaults feel crushed together, and somehow the overall sense is of a quite old app. It's one that has grown into this look, or maybe just hasn't grown into the king of minimalist appearance we're used to, and actually rather like. Now, after some protracted use, we find we're familiar with where we're going to look, so we don't really see the whole screen, we just see the information we want. Yet at times, we've still found it hard to make our way back to the Settings screen, so there could be more clarity there.
The new 4.91 release does improve the look and navigation of the app, plus it's easier to find tasks and appointments, because the software now supports iOS 9's Spotlight. It also changes the pricing structure so that you can now buy those different in-app purchases, which range from a buck to $15 for either the Premium edition, or a year's use of the optional syncing service -- which also gets you the Premium edition.
Pocket Informant 4.91 requires IOS 8.0 or higher, and the basic version of the app
is free in the App Store.
Who is Pocket Informant 4.91 for:
As with all productivity tools, you need to be busy, and preferably juggling lots of tasks and meetings. If that's you, then Pocket Informant will likely be an excellent fit.
Who is Pocket Informant 4.91 not for:
If you're already deep into another task manager of strength, such as OmniFocus or Things, then you might well like this -- but you don't especially need it.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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