Application: Egretlist [iTunes link] Developer: MindsMomentum Location: Puerto Rico Platform: iPhone Category: Productivity, task management

Meet Egretlist

Egretlist is an iPhone to-do app that links directly to your Evernote account. It finds all of your notes that contain checkboxes, lays them out in an intuitive way, and syncs any changes you make right back into Evernote. The app not only displays to-do items, but it also shows any related content in the given note, including images and attachments.

Besides its great looks and features, we’re very excited about Egretlist because it is among the first apps exclusively designed to extend existing Evernote functionality. How cool is that!

Evernote Tip: You can insert a checkbox into a note by pressing Shift+CMD+T (Mac) or CTRL+Shift+C (Windows).

Get Egretlist now from the AppStore

We were so impressed with Egretlist that we caught up with Juan Arzola, one of the people behind this great app. Here’s our conversation.

Meet the developer: Juan Arzola, Egretlist

Tell us about yourself
I’m a software designer at an art firm called MindsMomentum in Puerto Rico. There are six of us at the firm and two of us, including myself, worked on Egretlist.

As an Evernote user, what inspired you to create this application?
As a developer, my everyday work is task-driven. It’s full of programming and coding for various projects. I use Evernote to organize and track all the details for these projects. I also work with a lot of images and documents, and I like that in Evernote, a given task notes can include not only what needs to be done, but also the data and content that supports the task. Evernote’s great for me because it lets me take freestyle notes, yet easily organize them in really finite and specific ways.

In creating Egretlist, I took advantage of Evernote’s checkbox/task functionality and wanted to find a way to make better use of it. I wanted to create an application that uses organization functionality already built into Evernote, without creating a completely different app just for the sake of making it more task-oriented—all of my data is already stored and organized in Evernote. Egretlist, instead, extends the existing functionality to give additional support to people who use Evernote for tasks.

What are you hoping users get out of this?
Many people use Evernote to organize their tasks, but they don’t have a system that sorts them so directly. Task managers are great, but they’re usually only accessible from one platform, or if they are on multiple platforms, you still have to open the application to input data. Evernote reaches across platforms and has many ways to send data and content into a notebook and organize it. This makes checkboxed notes much more dynamic and is a really complete way to manage tasks.

What potential do you see in Evernote from a development standpoint?
As a developer, what’s great about Evernote is that the API really simple to understand. It allowed us to do anything that the standard Evernote clients do. This gives developers a lot of room for creativity and confidence that if we see a feature on an Evernote client, we can very likely build around it. This allows developers to do a lot, and think broadly about how to develop. Powerful clients mean lots of possibilities.

Developers also won’t find any roadblocks while building their app. This is great because we didn’t ever have to wonder if we’d get halfway through the project only to find that some roadblock had disabled us from developing further.

What was it like developing for Evernote?
Really great. The folks at Evernote were really helpful in fixing compatibility issues. It was an easy process to understand and the documentation was available and ready for us to use.

How long have you used Evernote?
For over two years.

What do you use Evernote for mostly?
I use it mainly for tasks and projects and assign a notebook for each project. Everything related to these projects is in a note. When I’m done with a project, I archive everything within a designated notebook and then delete the completed project’s notebook.

What versions of Evernote do you use?
I use Evernote on my iPhone, Mac desktop, and the Safari Web-clipper most of the time. Sometimes I’ll use the Web Clipper in Linux.

What does the future hold for the app
As we continue to develop the application, we’re paying attention to how Evernote continues to develop. If a new feature comes out that makes sense for Egretlist, we’ll add it. We also get inspiration from Evernote’s users as well. For example, there’s an interesting way of organizing in Evernote by working with notebooks and tags so we’re working on features that support users who prefer to organize with tags.

The Evernote API

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