As a student I’m always taking notes on the go thanks to a small notepad and pen that I keep with me almost all the time. The problem is that you can always forget your notepad or your pen could run out of ink. However, one thing that you never forget is your smartphone.
A great number of applications on the Play Store can act as your notepad, but there’s one that caught my eye. Catch Notes is a great way to create, manage and share notes. Not only that, but Catch is designed for collaborative note talking – perfect for any small project you might be cooking up with your friends and colleagues.
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Availability
Catch Notes is available on the Play Store but this is the first application I came across that is device dependent. It’s only accessible for certain hardware and software versions. I couldn’t install it on my stock LG Gingerbread ROM, but it installed perfectly when the phone was running Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean. Google Play is very ambiguous when it comes to this specific app.
Getting Started
When you first launch Catch, you are prompted to login, either your Google Account or your Facebook Account. I suggest you do this, because it will then automatically create a Catch account for you.
Once you’ve signed up, you are taken to your space area. Here you can manage all your spaces or notebooks if you like. You can have up to 5 spaces for your free account and you can add more if you go Pro.
My Spaces.
Here’s a list with the available account types:
- Free: 5 spaces, 70MB of new content per month to cloud service for text, web clips, photos, voice memos
- Catch Pro: 50 spaces, supports office documents, 1GB new content per month to cloud service – $4.99 per month
- Catch Premier: 200 spaces, supports office documents, 5GB new content per month to cloud service – $15.99 per month
Collaboration
Like I said, Catch is a collaborative note application. You can share your space with anyone who has a Catch account – and even if they don’t you can invite them via e-mail.
This comes in handy if you have a group school project and you need to keep track of your tasks and check them off when needed.
Colaborate.
I never had the chance to use this specific feature of Catch before finishing this review, but I might do so for a project that just got assigned to me and a couple of colleagues.
What Can You Actually “Catch”?
You are probably wondering what notes you can actually take with the application. Well, here’s a list:
- Notes – obviously
- Checklists
- Audio Notes
- Reminders
- Pictures
Scroll easily through your notes.
To show you how Catch can really help on your projects, let’s put this into context. Say you are the group leader of a small team and your job is to assign tasks to each member then monitor them. After sharing your Catch space with your team members, you can start by creating a text note for brainstorming ideas. When get a feel of the project’s direction, you start creating checklists to keep track of your tasks.
Need deadlines for your tasks? Simple! Just add a reminder and everyone will get a notification on their phone. If checklists are not enough to keep an eye on tasks, you can ask your teammates to upload a picture or share their progress with text notes as they go. Audio notes are also perfect for when you get an idea and can’t really type it. Just record it and it will be stored along everything else related to the project.
Add a new note.
Sync
Another great thing about Catch is that all your notes are stored in the cloud on Catch.com. This means that you have access to them anywhere – you only need an Internet connection and a browser-enabled device. There’s even Chrome and Firefox extensions to help you add interesting tidbits from inside your browser, so that you can save all your web discoveries.
Performance
Catch Notes handles well even under the most un-optimized ROMs out there. I’m running it on a LG Optimus One P500 with Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean. This ROM is not the best, performance-wise, but Catch still runs well on it. I’m sure that any current entry-level Android Phone could handle it without any issues.
Catch or Evernote?
You might be wondering how Catch is different from Evernote or any other note application out there. But I believe that comparing this application to Evernote or any alternative would be pointless. They both are very well built. However they are targeted to different markets. Evernote is for day-to-day note talking, while Catch is more focused on collaborative notes.
Final Words
Catch Notes is a fun and very productive way of organizing your thoughts and sharing them with friends. It can surely help you keep track of tasks or just only your thoughts. A big part of this article was written using Catch on my phone – yes, I am that crazy to write on a 3.2 inch display. I gave Catch a perfect score of 10 as it gets its job done very well, and the fact that you can Sync to the cloud and have access to your notes virtually anywhere is a big plus.
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