Notely first caught my attention a few weeks back. Since then, I’ve been playing with it from time to time. Since it also has a Facebook application, this particular piece of student aimed software has real potential to take off. Looking around the site, with its video tour and demo account (a must for a good webapp, I feel. Don’t make me register just to see what it is.) The people over at Notely have a definite eye for detail. For those of you not wanting to read a detailed review, here’s the long and short of it: Notely is a damn fine app, and definitely worthy of a close inspection. If you’re already committed to some sort of calendar application, however, you may be in for a bit more trouble.
The Basic Experience
Once you’re logged in, the experience of using the site is smooth, fast and easy. As I said, these guys have an eye for detail and don’t ignore the incredibly value of a solid user interface. It somewhat reminds me of the great use and simplicity of rememberthemilk.com. The app has a number of functions, all of great use to students. A calendar, file storage, links, notes, to-do, events, contacts and tasks. At first I was a bit surprised to see both ToDos and Tasks as they are generally the same thing, but in Notely Tasks involve what you have registered on your Courses list. So think of it more as “Assignments.”
Some things occasionally threw me off, however. Making a new note requires a “Number” but I was never terribly clear what it was, or why it had to have one when making the note. However, once you have the note in you can do quite a bit with it - the text editor is quite nice, and you can also export it to a number of formats. It could be a bit more robust, however, because I’m not going to actually compose notes in Notely but rather paste them in from something like OmniOutliner. And that works great, unless you go into Notely to edit the note. And at least from what I used, it messed up the editing fairly badly. You can see below what happens:
This can be avoided, of course, by using Notely more as a repository and not a place to make edits. Once in the system, it does offer a number of options regarding your notes. You can view it, edit it, save it as a PDF,
Word document, text file or even email it. Any friends you have registered with Facebook can even request the note, and you can request there notes as well. Certainly a handy feature, but it does depend on getting your friends on board. If only more students would really make an effort to be a bit more tactical in their studies (by making use of services such as Notely), we’d all have such a better experience.
One of my favorite features of Notely, however, is the ability to upload files. Occasionally I’ll need to print something on campus and emailing myself sometimes goes a bit awry, Notely is certainly good for this.
And like all good webapps, Notely a very solid mobile interface.
Facebook Integration
As Facebook is the current obsession on college campuses, it makes sense to give some special attention to the integration Notely has with the popular social site. So let’s break it down:
- Ability to quickly find and add friends from Facebook, if they are not using Notely - like almost all Facebook apps, you can invite them.
- From Facebook proper you can access your events, notes, to-dos and friends.
- You have quick access to your friends notes.
The one minor drawback I noticed was the lack of Notely’s impressive Dashboard and the Uploads section in its Facebook implementation. The Upload feature would seem to be very useful here.
It’s a nice little setup, all in all.
The Drawbacks
Unfortunately, there are some things left to be desired of Notely. But Notely’s creator seems very dedicated to improving the application as time goes on, and that can only spell good things for us all. As I say in the title, I want to use Notely. I really, really appreciate the interface and basic utility of the webapp. And I absolutely would not hesitate to suggest it to most students as a great way to get organized.
The problem for me is, and this is common enough with webapps, is that it doesn’t work with how I like to be organized and the technology I’m on the hook using. Notely is a fairly self-contained system. It can export your calendars and tasks, sure, and it can do the same for the notes you create. Unfortunately, it can’t import notes - you have to copy and paste if you compose somewhere else (and I always suggest against composing in a browser, no browser is so stable as you want to be writing something long in it.) It also can’t import existing calendars, or read webcal feeds - which means if you are already using a calendar, the only way to get it into Notely is by hand. And even then, the Notely calendar is not so robust as to handle repeated events and the like.
The other problem, along these lines, is there is no dynamic way to use Notely with your existing calendar system. You can save your calendar as an iCal file, but it’s not a subscription so it will not automatically keep itself up to date. This creates a big lifehacking no-no - my info is in more than one place. Part of my calendar exists on my computer and cellphone, perhaps even my ipod, and the other part is only on this website. For me, that’s a big problem. For a lot of you, but I’m a bit crazy - for a lot of you it likely isn’t an issue at all
One other drawback I did notice, aside from those mentioned, that you really couldn’t send files you upload to your friends, or perhaps send a private link to the file. This is tricky territory, however (a minefield of intellectual propery problems) and understandable that this feature was left out.
Conclusion
That all being said, Notely is a fine resource and as it is just getting going, I’m sure we can expect to see some really great things in the future. I certainly hope they make some of the changes I suggested as I would really like to make further use of this excellent piece of software myself. But either way, I’ll be keeping an eye on Notely.
If you like Notely, you can donate ($5) and the service will be ad-free for a year (though, it should be noted, Notely handles the ads there well and they are not particularly invasive.) The silver lining here is that the creator, Tom Whitson, has committed to donating any profits made from donations this year to Education for Life. What’s not to like?
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