Catch Notes (for iPhone)

Writers like me take notes all day long. We jot things down during meetings, while walking the dog, and sometimes even in the middle of a sentence, any time an idea strikes. And so do students, office workers, and many others, leaving us all in need of a great app that put tools at our fingertips for capturing an idea before it disappears into the ether. Poof.

Catch Notes for iPhone, which has come a long way since it first appeared in the Apple App Store, comes close to being one such all-purpose note-taking tool, but still needs a little fine tuning. The app excels at supporting collaboration, and also has unique features. Plus, it uses the full, longer screen size of the iPhone 5. A few problems, such as buggy audio memos and the inability to customize the colors of folders (or "spaces" as they're called in Catch) to your liking should be fixed. The color issue in particular is a shame because color can do wonders for your data.

Evernote, which to be fair looks drab when side-by-side with Catch, remains my go-to note-syncing app and PCMag's Editors' Choice on the iPhone, because it works well, has all the core functionality you'll need, and integrates with a huge variety of other services, which is key. Catch has better and more interesting collaboration features, though.

Set Up and Sign In
The Catch iPhone app is a very simple to set up. After downloading the free app and launching it, new users have three choices for registering an account: 1) sign into your Catch account or set one up with an email address and password, 2) log in using your Google ID, or 3) log in using your Facebook account.

Catch starts you off with a sample note that contains information about how to create notes, organize them, and sync them. It's also nice to see this dummy note appear where one would otherwise face a dauntingly blank canvas.

Catch Notes' Design and Features
If you've used Catch's iPad app, the look of the iPhone version will immediately strike you. Design remains crucial, in my opinion, because if you intend to use an app a lot, you have to like what you see. Catch for iPhone uses color and dynamic menus to not only provide utility, but also lure you to want to play with the app. To start a new note, you press a plus sign in the bottom center of the screen, which pops open a radial menu with options for adding a reminder, image, typed note, audio note, or checklist item.

I like Catch's checklists better than Evernote's because Catch lets you have a checklist item as a note type, whereas you can only add checklists inside an Evernote note using paragraph formatting. In Catch for iPhone, your to-do tasks appear right on screen when you're looking at your list of notes. In Evernote, you have to open a note to see your to-do tasks.

In testing, the audio memo feature was very buggy. I was able to record just fine. A microphone appeared on screen, and it seemed to record my voice, as it responded to changes in my voice's volume. But when I saved and closed the audio memo, it would not playback. The following day, I finally had some success, but I don't know why it didn't work initially (and repeatedly). I was testing on a new iPhone 5, running iOS 6, with a strong Wi-Fi connection.

Catch for iPhone formerly did not have folders, relying only on tags for sorting, but it does now. Folders, also known as "spaces," let you group your notes much more effectively than tags alone. Each space has a name or title and a color, but you can't customize the colors, unfortunately. Whatever color Catch assigns, that's the one you get. I use color in all segments of my life to stay organized, and I really hate not being able to control which folders are assigned which colors.

One additional feature is the ability to add geo-location information to your note, a great feature for frequent travelers who need to be able to look up notes based on where a meeting or business took place.

Price
Just like Evernote, Catch apps are free, as is an account, but users can pay $4.99 per month or $44.99 per year to upgrade to a Pro account for a few extra perks. This costs the same as an Evernote Premium account ($45 per year).

A free Catch account gives you five spaces for private or shared notebooks (or "spaces") and the ability to add 70MB per month of new content. A Pro account lets you have 50 spaces, 1GB of new content uploaded per month, and the ability to attach office documents to your notes.

Unique Features: Tagging and Collaboration
Catch uses a unique tagging system for your notes. You create tags by typing a hashtag (#) before any word right in your note. The words then look as if they are hyperlinks, indicating that they're now tags. I can see how some users will find this concept simple because you never have to add tags as a secondary step. Tags are always at your fingertips while you're writing notes. The problem is you can't easily reference which tags you've used in the past. My problem is that this system allows for inconsistencies that don't occur when you can select tags from a pre-made list. For example, in Catch, I might write into one note the tag "#iPadApps" and in other places use the more general "#MobileApp" or "#MobileApps." As a highly organized person, seeing inconsistently written tags like these would drive me batty.

If you like Catch's unique tagging system, you'll probably also like its search box, which lets you look for hashtags on notes, or filter notes by other criteria, like favorite notes marked with a star or those that you've shared with collaborators.

Catch's collaborative take on notes really isn't like any other note-taking system I've seen, and in a good way. Basic collaboration takes the form of emailing notes to others, and that's nothing new. Every note in Catch has a comments thread at the bottom. I like that the user as well as the collaborators can discuss a note's content without anyone messing up the contents of the note itself. Imagine it in action in a business setting. Perhaps you're taking notes while traveling with colleagues or while at a conference. One person can make a note quickly while in a conference session and post it to her colleagues, and others read it, ask follow up questions, or simply add her two cents, all in the comments. Comments always stay with the note, too, so everything syncs to all your devices.

Catch All or Catch None?
The Catch iPhone app is a good choice for note-takers who need collaboration features, although the app still needs some fine tuning. If you're a stickler for consistency, as I am, you might find the hashtag-as-tagging feature not to your taste. The inability to choose your own colors for folder or "spaces" also kind of baffles me.

Evernote may not be as pretty, but it's more reliable and integrates with a huge array of other services, making it PCMag's Editors' Choice for iPhone note-taking apps. If your notes tend to be more along the lines of to-do lists, try one of my favorite apps, Awesome Note (+ToDo) ($3.99), which doesn't have its own syncing features but can integrate with Evernote if you need syncing.

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