Informant
Calendar/notepad/task app with something for everyone
$49.99; syncing service $24.99 a year From Fanatic Software, pocketinformant.com Needs OS X 10.11 or later The Mac isn’t exactly short of calendar apps. Nor is it crying out for another task manager or note-keeping tool. But Informant is none of those. It’s all of them, together in one app, and has enough features to keep even the most dedicated Getting Things Done acolyte happy.
This doesn’t mean you have to be wedded to that way of working to get the most from Informant — far from it. If all you want is a tool to keep your appointments, reminders, and notes together, it delivers there too.
As you might expect from an app that covers so much ground, it’s not the easiest to get to grips with, and you will find yourself tripping over its interface once or twice. There are some quirks, too. For example, you can add rich text notes to tasks, but these are separate from the notes you keep in the Notes view.
To the good stuff, however — and there’s plenty of it. By default, Informant shares data, as long as you grant it permission, with your iCloud Contacts, Calendars, and Reminders. Subscribe to the optional syncing service and you can synchronize data you create in Informant with the iOS or, whisper it, Android versions. You can also sync with Evernote — notebooks you select for syncing are displayed as projects in the Notes view — and with Google Calendar, Google Tasks, and Toodledo. We found, however, that syncing was often sluggish, and changes on our Mac sometimes took several minutes to be reflected on our iPhone.
Perhaps Informant’s greatest strength is the flexibility it allows in the way you view data. You can have multiple tabs open at once and use one to show tasks, another notes, and in a third focus on the current day. However, we were frustrated by this separation of data types and would’ve liked to be able to click on a project and view all of its notes, tasks, and appointments together.
Informant understands natural language, so you can click on its menu bar item and type “meeting with Bob at 11 on Friday,” and it will create the appointment.
Triggers allow you to create templates for events or tasks and have them applied when you type a keyword you’ve set. So, type the name of a supermarket and have sub-tasks set to buy specific items, for example. Tasks and events can also be filtered according to filters you set, such as tags or contexts.
The bottom line. Informant is jammed with features and very flexible. If you’re prepared to be patient and learn to use it, you will be rewarded.