Even though I have an iPhone, an iPad and two Macs syncing my tasks and projects all day long through OmniFocus’ online service, I often forget about stuff. The most trivial things, like buy some iTunes credit or check on the car’s gas. I guess the reason is that I’ve never settled to bring these common, real-life tasks and activities into my GTD workflow, which is mainly set up for work purposes. I know it’s wrong as GTD should be for everything and anything, still it happens.
NoteNow, a simple $0.99 app developed by Manolo Sanudo, aims at fixing this issue with world’s most popular organization system: sticky notes. Who hasn’t written down things on a sticky note at least once? I have. And boy, you can trust sticky notes when they’re in sight. They make you remember you have to do stuff by looking at you in the eye. But how could you ever make sticky notes work on an iPhone, where there’s no desktop to attach notes to and Apple doesn’t want developers to use private APIs to enable secret, and perhaps dangerous for the iOS experience, features?
NoteNow can put notes on the lock screen with the easiest way that’s possible: by turning a note into an image and use it as a lock screen wallpaper. As you open the app, you’re presented a blank screen with a note and a keyboard; write your notes, and swipe down to hide the keyboard. Now you have a sticky note ready to be used in the lock screen. Either take a screenshot by holding down Home + Power, or tap on the lower part of the screen to save the image in your Camera Roll. Open the image, set it as a lock screen background and you’re good to go. Every time you’ll pull the iPhone out of your pocket and look at it to see what time is it, you’ll also see the damn sticky note saying that you have to buy coffee for mom. Or something. Simple, easy and persistent, I’d say.
NoteNow lets you choose between different templates and backgrounds, allows you to pick a different font size and, overall, it’s a pretty simple and almost fun way to remember tasks by just looking at a locked phone. I’m sure most of MacStories readers won’t need this as they’re loyal and efficient OmniFocus / Things users who don’t miss a single task in their GTD inbox, but if you’ve been looking for an easy to use app to store all your other thoughts and activities with a different method, well – there you go.
