iPhone app review: Moe’s Notes

May 16, 2010 by Christine Chan

Everyone has experienced this one way or another – you’re out somewhere and you need to jot something down for whatever reason, but there’s no paper or pen. You have your iPhone though, and that is pretty much the Swiss Army knife of tech. But there are a lot of note taking apps on the App Store, you say. Yes, that’s correct, but Moe’s Notes is different. With Moe’s Notes on the iPhone, you now have the ultimate note keeper on your device.

When the app is first launched, the splash screen will show up but then be replaced with a new note screen (this can be changed in settings to another view of your choice) in a matter of seconds. Creating a new note is probably where you’ll be spending most of your time in the app, and it is simple and easy to follow, while boasting an impressive array of features.
All if your new notes can get a title, if you choose to. If you have no title, it will just get the date or geolocation as the default title, which you can find in settings. There are four elements to a note – audio, photo or video, text, and location, as well as tags and even the ability to set an alarm for any reminders if need be.

The audio recording is quite impressive for any note-taking app. As you record audio, it will display a visual sound wave to show low and high pitches. If you need to pause the recording but want to continue it in a couple of seconds then hitting the stop button and then record button again will allow uninterrupted audio recording. This is great for those moments when you need to think about what to say more (you know you’ve had those moments before!). But the most impressive feature lies within the audio editing capabilities of Moe’s Notes.

If you have the audio open in the app, there will be an ‘edit’ menu option, which has editing tools such as clearing audio, changing the volume of playback (so if it was recorded low, you can increase the volume to hear it better), trimming, stripping silence, and reverse the audio, you know, so you can sound like you’re possessed by the devil. Once all desired edits are made, saving it is done automatically once you hit the ‘ok’ button for the effect. There’s also an option to change the pitch of the voice, so you can make it slower or faster. If you’re unsatisfied with any change, simply hit the Revert button.

The text field for a note is quite simple – just enter any plain text you need. There’s an option to reveal phone numbers, emails, and URLs, which will make any of the mentioned clickable and open the corresponding app (Phone, Email, or Safari). Its pretty basic, but that is because most of your notes should be within the media parts of the note.

To add an image or video (3GS) to the note, hit the camera button and it will immediately launch with a camera capture. If you want to add an existing image, just exit the camera and you’ll get the option to ‘Copy’ a visual from the camera roll, or if you already took a picture to copy it to the camera roll. Once there’s an image, you can resize it if needed. The only drawback so far is that you can only add one image to a note. So if you wanted to use multiple images, there will need to be one note for each. Hopefully that can be addressed in a future update.

All notes will be geotagged with location from the device’s GPS, which I have found to be scarily accurate, down to the address at times. If you are one to travel a lot, this feature may be extremely useful to help you keep organized. Optional is the tagging of notes, where there are some predefined tags already, or you can make your own. If you make notes to remind yourself of stuff, you can even set an alarm reminder through the use of push notifications. There is also a setting to make the audio play once you set a reminder (view the notification), which I think is a great feature.

When you go to the main screen to view all of your notes, there are three ways to filter your notes at the bottom of the screen. You can filter by tags, date, or even location. The location is probably the coolest visual way to filter, because it will pull up a map, and your notes with geolocation will appear as purple pins on the map. Tapping on a pin will bring up the title, and there will be a popup menu to open it.

Another way to go through your notes is to filter by search with the search bar at the top of the note list. As you type, the app will search through all titles and body text of your notes, so there’s no waiting.

While there is no support for syncing with a cloud service or desktop, how would you get your notes out of the app? Well, all your notes created in Moe’s Notes can be emailed or even posted onto Facebook (if you want to share something). When emailed, the email will include the note text in the body of the email, and the image and audio will be attached as attachments. When you post it to Facebook though, it seems it gets split up into wall posts and the mobile uploads folder if you upload them separately. Text sill be included with the photo as a caption only if you choose to upload the photo first, otherwise any text is posted separately. Audio cannot be posted. This is quite disappointing, but I have no idea how the Facebook API works, so I canny delve into why this app is limited when it comes to posting your notes. But there is a Batch Upload option in the main menu, so you can take care of any multiple related notes, so there’s a plus.

If you’re a number cruncher, you may be pleased to know that you can view statistics of your Moe’s Notes usage via the Stats option in the main menu. This will provide you with how much data you’re using in your notes, how many notes you have, how much has been uploaded, etc. It’s useful if you’re into that kind of thing.

The app is pretty customizable with all if the tweaks that are possible in the settings to make the app all your own. While there aren’t any UI customizations, there are a lot of options that relate to how you start the app, how you filter, how you want your audio and pictures or video, auto-recording in the audio screen or auto-camera in the visual screen,and other minor twinks.

Overall, for what it is, Moe’s Notes is a very well done note application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that makes it extremely simple to create multimedia rich notes while also packing in the power and features to make it even appeal to heavy users. All of this is done in a very nice and slick interface as well, that is just smooth in all screens. While there is room for improvements like a syncing option, posting audio to Facebook, and providing a little bit more of formatting for text, overall this app is very well worth the money.

Four stars out of five

Available for $.99 in the App Store