Sorted – Fast Tasks
A reminders app for anyone who likes gestures
$3.99 Developer OneReminder, staysorted.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8 or later
There are many scheduling apps available on the App Store, all claiming to offer a comprehensive solution. This app certainly seems to have taken some inspiration from one of the App Store favorites, Clear. However, the developer claims that “Sorted helps you stay organized faster than ever before.”
Like Clear, the app is gesture-based. Creating a reminder is a cinch – just drag down from the top of the app window, let go and a colored bar appears for you to type in text. You can also simply press and hold anywhere on the screen. Use a timer scroller to amend the time (scroll slightly to the left of the dial to change the hour, to the right to change the minutes), label the reminder, and set it to repeat if required. Other gesture-based operations include pinching a list of reminders apart to insert a new one in the middle. If one appointment is delayed – which will then affect the rest of your day – you can highlight a number of entries and delay them, or stretch them out and give yourself a bit more time between each. You can also easily move your reminder to a different day; just swipe it, hit the calendar at the bottom and tap the new date.
It took us a while to find completed reminders; a timerstyle icon takes you to a window showing completed tasks. You can delete past reminders from here, or usefully, you can use the details again to set a new one.
You can label your reminder with a text category but, like Clear, Sorted lists reminders in shades (according to the theme you’ve selected), and the shade used is down to the order of the entry, not its label. Tasteful? Yes. Immediately obvious as to the category? No. Obviously, if you just need reminding and don’t need an overview of task categories, this isn’t a problem.
There’s a Settings area (for sounds, week start day and time, 24-hour clock and so on), but you can’t color-code according to labels. Having said that, it’s easy to go into labels and create any text category you want. Another quirk is that when adding subsequent reminders using the press and hold technique, they default to the same start time as the last entry; we would like to have been able to set a gap time between each reminder.
Sorted syncs via iCloud, but you can’t link it with other calendars. Although that – and Siri integration – is apparently in the pipeline. And reminders are time-based only, not locationbased. There’s a bit of a learning curve to the app too, but a Help section is on hand.
the bottom line. As with Clear, we like the interface, and if you use Sorted a lot, you’ll get increasingly efficient at using it.