Classic Notes – The Magical Memo Pad that Doubles as a Utility Belt!
by Jonathan Lonczak
Jul 27, 2011 10:26 AM –
Install
Classic Notes – Notepad, ToDo. Minimal and Efficient. Have you ever wanted a magical notepad that could do anything you asked it to? Have you ever wanted to be able to have a legal memo pad, pocket translator, mortgage calculator, dictionary, thesaurus, conversion calculator, and music information manager all in one? If so classic notes is the application for you! Classic Notes is a magical notepad that can do all of these things and more. Classic Notes comes in a minimalistic style to make doing work, both attractive and fun and is loaded with options to make this application one productivity tool that you might not know you can’t live without.
Price: Free, $1.99
Tested on: HTC Droid Incredible 2, HTC Thunderbolt, Samsung Galaxy Tablet 7″
Content Rating: Low Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Excellent minimalistic user interface simulates the feeling of writing on a legal memo pad!
- Allows import and export of application backup files, CSV’s, and Notepad Documents!
- Options to create calendar reminders from notes, pin to status bar, make shortcut to home screen,attach various file types, and Geotag!
- Allows sharing of notes to any application which supports text based sharing!
- Easily translate a message from one language to another with Google Translate!
- Adjustable font size and type!
- Supports text to speech!
- Sortable entries!
- Supports password lock of private notes!
- Many included extras: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Example Word Usage, Mortgage Calculator, Album Art Look up, Postal Code Look up, Question and Answer, Slang, Spelling Suggestions, Weather, Stopwatch, and much more!
Cons
- No incorporated online backup
- Plain menus and input boxes for additional utilities in stark contrast to the minimalistic but stylish interface of the main application.
- Find Similar Artist feature was not working at time of testing.
Features:
Classic Notes is an excellent note taking application and a veritable Swiss Army Knife of utilities. Its includes a standard memo pad, to do lists, abbreviations, conversions, dictionary, etymology, example word usage, financial calculators including “mortgage calculator, discount calculator, sales tax calculator, standard calculator, tip calculator, postal code look up, Google Translate, question and answer, slang, spelling suggestions, stop watch, thesaurus, and weather; music look up options including album art, artist information, artist image, artists similar to, and track information. The app is also sortable, can be backed locally, can import text files and CSVs, can pin notes to the status bar or to the calendar, and can password lock notes for privacy. Yes, this application is the mother of all memo pads and is packed with features like no memo pad I have ever seen. Now let’s take a look at how does all these amazing things function!
First, the interface for Classic Notes is very much in the style of a legal memo pad. The application is set with a background which is the same color as your standard legal pad. Whenever, you are creating or reading a note within the application the backdrop will have the same margin lines shown on a legal pad as well. This helps you to have a more comfortable and relaxed writing experience as opposed to applications like Evernote, QuickOffice, or Documents to Go where the margins are all invisible and the interface is less personal. Instead Classic Notes goes with the legal pad backdrop and a non-standard font in order to enhance the personalization of the writing experience and to make using the application more comfortable and enjoyable.
Whenever you create a note the application gives you a multiplicity of options to incorporate with the note itself or share it with others. Any note created can be given a priority, attached to the calendar, exported to the usual suspects, added to the Android status bar, given a homescreen shortcut, translated with Google Translate, attached with images, audio, video, sketches, QR codes, and Geotagged. These options allow for an insane amount of customization to the content generated in this application and I will cover a few of them briefly.
Attaching notes to the calendar is very easy to do. Just press the menu key while in a note that you wish to attach to your calendar then navigate to more and select “Calendar”. Upon selecting the calendar option, Classic Notes will create a calendar event with the title of the note as the event name and the contents of the note labeled as the event description. This allows you to easily create calendar reminders with detailed notes without having to do all of the work in the standard and uncomfortable Google Calendar application.
Next, is the Google Translate feature. This allows you to take the contents of the note and translate them from any language in to any language. This feature is extremely useful for me since my fiance’s family lives in Thailand. In order to create a new note in the Thai language, which uses symbols instead of letters. All I needed to do was: write what I wanted to say in English, select the Google Translate option in the application, choose the language I was translating from and the language I was translating to, and classic notes provided the written translation for me within seconds along with notations showing what translation had been performed. The process was extremely easy and there were many language options, which makes this application of huge value to those of us who need to communicate with members of a foreign country who cannot write in their native language.
Notes can also be shared through all of the normal sharing options. Instead of sending a specific file through the various sharing services the application copies the contents of the notes and pastes them in the body of the shared message through the sharing service you are using. For instance, if I were to share a note through Google+ the application would generate a new Google+ post with the contents of my note in the body of the post. This allows you to easily send notes to other people without requiring them to download any special application to read the contents of the note.
Not only is Classic Notes a stellar note taking application, but it is also a veritable Swiss Army Knife of utilities as I mentioned at the beginning of the review. Unfortunately, to review all the various utilities in this application would take forever so I am just going to highlight a few key ancillary features while reviewing this application. The extras I will be covering in this review are the mortgage calculator, example word usage, and weather. I tested out most of the extra utilities included with the application and all of them worked splendidly except for those pertaining to music. I am not sure if this is a glitch in the application or lack of artist recommendations in the database, but I am sure the developer will be fine tuning this aspect in later updates, since he has assured me that Classic Notes is still a work in progress and that there will be more updates to come before he considers it a completely finished product and moves on from updating it to create a slew of new applications.
The Mortgage Calculator utility was excellent. To open up this feature of the application navigate to Menu » Extras » Financial Related » Mortgage Calculator. From here you are able to input the amount of the loan, the interest rate, and the term. Then Classic Notes generates a standard note on the memo pad background with a full payment schedule for the loan details requested from the first month of payment down to the last. The speed of the calculations was instant, and its translation in to a note is excellent because it allows you to retain the full payment information for further review or to share with others. The only downside here may be that there is no special options for unique mortgages like an ARM or Balloon loans. Although I would personally never sign up for one of those loans it would be a good option to include within the application.
The “Example Word Usage” feature gives example sentences for words of your choosing. In order to use this feature just navigate to Menu » Extras » Example Word Usage and then type in a word. I used the word “cornucopia” and it gave me a few example sentences here is one of them: ““You got Southern morons, East coast morons, Midwest morons, an Alaskan moron… the cornicopia of morons.” I Googled this phrase and found that it was taken from www.wordnik.com. I liked the example provided and I liked the humor and was overall very impressed with this feature. Just like every other utility in this application the results of the utility usage are shown in note format and more than one example sentence was provided.
Finally, I tried the Weather utility in the Classic Notes application. The path to get in to the weather utility is Menu » Extras » Weather and then you just have to type in the zip code of the location you wish to get a weather forecast from. After typing in the zip code the application will display a note with a 7 day weather forecast inside. These forecasts will include weather conditions, wind speed, and the projected high and low temperatures for the day. This allows you to get an easy to interpret forecast easily and quickly. It could also be fantastic for those who wish to document weather conditions when inputting entries in to their diary
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Classic Notes Sample Note
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Classic Notes To Do List
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Classic Notes Note Reminder
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Classic Notes Word Usage Cornucopia
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Classic Notes Stopwatch
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Classic Notes Pin to Status Bar
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Classic Notes Notes Options
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Classic Notes Calendar
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Classic Notes Weather
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Classic Notes Translate to Thai
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Classic Notes Price List
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Classic Notes Postal Code Lookup
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Classic Notes Financial
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Classic Notes Mortgage Calculator Input
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Classic Notes Mortgage Calculator
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Classic Notes Share
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Classic Notes Extras
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Classic Notes Extras 2
Usefulness:
Classic Notes is extremely useful to all Android users due to it’s large amount of incorporated extras. This application is like a Utility Belt; whenever you think of something you, need in a pinch, this application has it. I especially like the way it exports all of the information from the utilities into a note. I like this feature because it allows you to keep saved and written documents of things that it would normally be inconvenient to do so with. For example, if I were to download a mortgage calculator from the Android market and use it to determine a mortgage payment it is highly unlikely that it would produce a savable copy of that information for me to use. Instead it would just show the estimated monthly payment and it would be up to the user to document the rest. Classic Notes understands this weakness in standard applications which provides similar functions and overcomes them with the automatic export to notepad feature.
Unfortunately I did have some trouble with the music extras. I tried to use the “Find Artists Similar Feature” and was not able to find similar artists to anyone; even the Beatles. However, the developer is aware of these bugs and is continually updating the application with bug fixes and new features.
Ease of Use:
Classic Notes is extremely easy to use. All of the options are stored within the applications menus and none of the options are ever hidden too deep in the application to find. The various saving and export features make it extremely easy to backup your notes and share them with others. It is also extremely simple to create calendar reminders, to do lists, and home screen shortcuts with this application.
Frequently Used:
I have used Classic Notes frequently over the past few weeks just to experiment with all the various functions and features. Will this application become a daily flyer for me? Possibly, I currently use Evernote for most of my Android note taking for its online backup and time/date stamp features. Classic Notes retains most of Evernote’s features minus the online backup and offers many additional features and a more comfortable interface. I will continue to experiment with both applications, and in the event of the addition of online backup and restore this application could become an Evernote replacement for me.
Interface:
The interface for Classic Notes is minimalistic, but attractive. I love the layout of the notes portion of the application. The legal memo pad background combined with the stylized font creates a very natural note taking atmosphere. The font is adjustable in size to accommodate for those of us that need reading glasses, and for the select few with perfect vision. My only issues with the application interface is its lack of automated online backup, and the simplicity of the inputs for the utilities.
The lack of online backup is understandable for this application due to the expense of such a system. In order to support online backup for individuals through the developer there would be many security issues and costs. Instead I think the developer should look in to incorporating DropBox Sync for the notes application. This would allow you to backup your notes remotely with much less overhead for the developer. I am sure this integration will be difficult to achieve and for the moment you can just export your notes and manually sync them to DropBox to back it up so this is not a huge issues for those of us with cloud syncing needs.
The other issues is the plainness of the inputs for all of the utilities. Currently all of the menus for the utilities that are included with Classic Notes are nothing more then simple text boxes for input on a simple grey backdrop. I would prefer to see more style put in to this portion of the application as is seen in the main notepad portion of the application. This would make the user feel more comfortable and make the application feel more refined giving it an aesthetic appeal which is needed in order to rival Evernote.
Tags:
Android App,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Calendar,
calendar notes,
Classic Notes,
Classic Notes Notepad To Do,
Dictionary,
Memo Pad,
Notes,
password lock,
Thesaurus,
translate,
Weather
Categorised in: Productivity
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