UpWord Notes is a lovely little note-taking app that launched on the App Store late last month. Even though there are several note-taking apps already out there, UpWord Notes manages to offer an interesting set of features, coupled with a neat, minimal UI that sets it apart from the rest.
UpWord Notes is primarily designed to quickly let you jot down your ideas, quick snippets, or basically anything that you’d want to retrieve later. It works much like Scratch or Drafts, offering a dead simple & minimal note-taking area to type down your ideas, which are saved automatically. However, it’s what the app lets you do with these snippets later is what sets it apart from the rest. UpWord Notes offers gestures that let you convert any line into specially formatted styles like Lists, Important, Quote or Checked. Swiping left toggles between the first three options while swiping right marks the current line as checked. Take for example, you’ve just noted down 7 items that you want to pick up from the supermarket on your way to your friend’s house. In this list, the ‘beer’ is very important. Just swipe swipe swipe and UpWord will cleverly format your list. One neat feature in the app is the option to set a reminder for each note. Once you’ve typed down anything, you can ask UpWord to remind you about it whenever you want. Your notes can be organized into categories, favorited, archived or deleted easily.
UpWord Notes offers some customization options like the choice of three themes, along with font type and size. However, I do think some of the color choices in these themes are weird and look odd. I’d have a loved to see the default theme use blue & white instead of the odd yellow gradient seen when you swipe on a note in the list. UpWord Notes integrates with Dropbox and the files are saved as normal text files. There’s also TextExpander integration.
UpWord Notes really offers a great set of features through a neatly laid out UI. I wish it had a tad more polish to it though, especially if the developers tweaked the colors. It’s still is a fantastic app that’s available for just $0.99 on the App Store.
Update
The app has been updated to version 2.0, which is touted as a major release by the developers. Here are the release notes:
New Features:
– Next-gen swipe gestures! No need to place the cursor before swiping to cross off or add bullets. Swipe on ANY text and it will magically get formatted. This even works when the keyboard is hidden.
– New text gesture! Re-order any list by press & hooolding until the text shakes. Then drag the text wherever you want. So much easier than cut & paste.
– New sounds for swipe and pull to clear
– Evernote Sync
– Custom order your notes & folders with drag’n’drop
– x-url-callback for search
Bug Fixes:
– Cut & paste fixed!
– Moving a folder no longer erase the favorites and alarms inside that folder
– Dropbox sync improvements