We’re certain that at least a handful of college students have spent a portion of their student loans to acquire an iPod touch or iPhone recently, and maybe you’re one of them. But that’s okay, because now with Notely, you can justify that expense under ’school supplies’. Notely is a web application that is designed specifically to help students stay organized, and features access for iPhone and iPod touch. With Notely, students can track class schedules and grades, take lecture notes, and access calendars, tasks, and to-do lists. We’ll break all the features down to show you how college and high school students can stay on track with Notely.
First off, we all know why you’re in college in the first place, to party get good grades, right? Notely offers grade tracking so there’s no surprises on report card day. You can track grades down to individual assignments per course, and multiple grading methods are supported.
There is a calendar feature in Notely which takes a little getting used to, especially if you are already using Google Calendars, iCal, or Outlook. Notely’s version of a calendar shows the month view by default, and each day that has events associated with it will be highlighted. By clicking on a day you’d expect to get the day’s list of events in an hour by hour view, but instead you get a list of events for that day listed below the month view. If there are no events for that day, clicking doesn’t do anything. You can switch to a day view from the tool bar below, which does show the events listed hour by hour in either 12 or 24-hour formats. Notely also has global time zone support available in the settings.
Notel has whiteboards for collaboration between you and up to 5 other users. These whiteboards don’t offer drawing tools, but you can embed links or images, which make them more like shared document authoring than a true whiteboard. Notely whiteboards support versioning so you can go back to previous versions of a particular whiteboard and restore it.
There is a course ledger available in Notely which lists your current curriculum. The list contains course name, teacher name, room number, and the start and end dates for each course. You can also see any notes that have been associated to each course and view them directly from this list.
Notes are taken with Notely’s built-in word processor and are auto saved every 15 seconds so you don’t lose your work. These are associated to a particular course, but you can create an empty course for storing general notes. Each note is saved on the server can be accessed later for editing. Notes are downloadable as PDF, Word, or plain text. You can even email them directly from Notely to any email address.
The schedule tool is probably the least exciting feature of Notely. While it does have drag-and-drop, the times in the schedule are not tied at all to the events in the calendar. This is baffling. Why not just replace the schedule with the daily calendar view? That way, all your events for the day will show up as you add them to your calendar. We see no use for the schedule feature as it currently exists.
Notely has a formidable to-do list manager that will meet most student’s needs, except for those hardcore GTD followers. Since each to-do is associated with a time and day, tasks will automatically show up in your calendar as you would expect. To-do lists can be also be downloaded in iCal format which is handy if you use a calendar outside of Notely.
There are additional tools in Notely that students will find useful from time to time. There is a scientific calculator, a unit convertor, a language translator, and a dictionary.
Notely also has loads of features for sharing information with your fellow students. You can’t share grades with other Notely users, and maybe that’s a good thing, but there are plenty of other Notely features that can be shared such as the calendar, whiteboards, lecture notes, and tasks. Any information that has date or time associated with it is available in iCal, and most other data can be subscribed to via RSS.
Notely was single-handedly created by Britsh student Tom Whitson, who gives Notely away for free but gladly takes donations to help with the further development.
Our recommendations for future enhancements
- Replace the schedule feature with the daily calendar view.
- Add keyboard shortcuts - Saves iPod touch and iPhone users a lot of tapping.
- Integration with Sandy - It would be great to email calendar events, tasks, and information to Notely.
- Integration with Jott - We would love to be able to add items to Notely by calling a phone number and leaving a message, and that’s especially handy on the iPhone!
iPhone and iPod touch users can access Notely at iphone.notely.net.
Add a comment (None yet)
