May 22, 2012

Like many people today, I live by my calendar. Being the OCD Control Freak that I am, I sometimes wake in the middle of the night, worried that I forgot to do something, call someone, go somewhere. If you know the feeling, read on.

After a recent comment on an old blog post about a notes app, I started looking at Beesy, which is primarily a project management app. (I would not use it just for notes.) It seemed really full featured, and I wondered if I could use it as my calendar. Before I go any farther, I will say that as it stands now, Beesy cannot replace my calendar. The primary reason is, it does not offer time support in any of its many modules. In order to streamline things, I shouldn’t have to create a calendar event, and then identify it as a Task, Event, Meeting, etc. (all of which are open for interpretation, since many people see Events and Meetings or Tasks and Events as the same thing). I want to create an item (whatever I choose to call it) and be able to assign a start and end time to it, if necessary. Without that functionality, the app is only half helpful.

Simply creating calendar items in Beesy is also limiting, as they will not show up in your day, or even week view, if they don’t have a project attached to them. Once you have created a calendar item, Beesy can attach one heck of a lot of information to it. You can add: Task, Event, Comments, Draw, Web, Map, Call, Meeting, Document, Question, Idea, Customer, or Contact. Everything is automatically placed into a Default Goal Default Project. You have to backtrack to change this. I would include an option in the original edit screen to change or assign a new project name to whatever you’re working on. Every event automatically gets Default Topic. I would also offer the ability to set this at the time you create the item.

Beesy is not intuitive. It requires both reading the help and trial and error. When you look at “Your agenda” you get a large block showing your items based on Important/Non-Important and Non-Urgent/Urgent. However, the view doesn’t show you what project any item is attached to, and you are required to tap the item to find out more details – which still doesn’t tell you which project the item is attached to. It’s so cumbersome to actually change items to a new project that I’m inclined to leave everything as the default project…which rather defeats the point of having projects.

There are some features in Beesy that I really like. I just wish it was all better integrated into itself. Having each item as a Note is awesome. But it’s still a calendar item. I want to tap that one item and have additional things (calls, meetings, tasks, etc.) attach to it. I want to be able to see a month view – I’m a big picture kinda gal. My middle name is Logistics. If you’re only looking at a week at a time, you’re going to miss something – or get behind.

I think the pieces are all in place for Beesy, but they aren’t yet put together in the best possible configuration. But it’s a beautiful piece of software that should come together in the near future, and perhaps be that brilliant combination of calendar, and task and project manager that I’ve been missing since I left Palm os.

Beesy is available for iPad only in iTunes for $5.99.

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