It’s the other to-do items and notes that have floated from one system to another for me. I’ve even used paper because dang, these electronic systems get too complicated. I use Evernote to capture a lot of stuff, but it’s not fast enough to suit me for capturing quick to-do items, and you can’t create to-do’s from the iPhone. It’s great for reference material, though, so I wanted to keep it in my system.

Therefore, Awesome Note has filled a gap. It lets me create categories and combine notes with to-do items in ways that are intuitive to me.

* It has to-do flexibility. Badges update in intuitive ways (all notes, notes due today, or today and overdue). It is easy to make notes into to-do’s or to make a note with pics in the to-do. This is important to me because I often snap pictures of things to remind me to do them or to add info. (Example: “Call Linda on Tuesday about lunch,” with a snapshot of the scrap of paper she scribbled her phone number on.)

* A due date of “someday” puts the task in a “next” list. I have all kinds of stuff that needs to be done sooner rather than later but if I put it into Gcal I just move it back day by day, which is frustrating and discouraging. The “next” list solves this tidily.

* You can also rank notes and to-do’s by priority and sort them that way. In fact you can sort by due date, priority, date created, and date modified, both within and between categories. The newest version also lets you view categories by a “journal” view, which is nice if you happen to be using that category for a journal, such as I did when traveling.

* It has templates. It has nothing to do with organization, but I like, eg, the travel ones for planning trips.

* You can add a passcode by category.

* It syncs with Google Docs and Evernote. DING DING DING. I back up my Awesome Notes to Google Docs for safekeeping (it restores from there too), and I sync them with Evernote. It creates new notebooks that start with [aNote] and plunks your notes right in there. It’s not gorgeous and has some formatting issues, but this is a quick-and-dirty system for me and works fine. My notes are there on my Macs and my iPhone, and it’s painless.

* It’s got a landscape mode so you can actually do some hardcore typing if you want to make long notes or journal.

* It’s got a Quick Memo function so you can jot stuff down and file it later.

Example: for this blog post, I had an idea “Blog about Awesome Note.” So I put that in Awesome Note as a task. As I thought about stuff, I added it either into my iPhone or through Evernote. The task therefore ended up being a to-do item with text notes and screenshots to remind me of things I wanted to mention. Now I’ve filled in around the edges and am good to go.

Awesome Note recently posted two updates to the App Store. Notably, you can add maps to your notes, and they’ve streamlined the process of adding notes, transferring notes to other folders, and various other operations. If you e-mail a note that contains a map, then a link to the map remains. Unfortunately, the geolocation does not transfer to Google Docs or Evernote, and that shortcoming makes it fairly useless (I want a way to get ALL my data out of my phone). I hope the developers make that data exportable, but in the meantime it’s useful for making simple notes (I used the functionality in Italy to make a note like “meet HERE at 4 PM,” because the note does open Google Maps).