Originally published at: https://tidbits.com/2018/05/08/agenda-offers-a-new-take-on-note-taking-and-task-management/
Momenta’s Agenda provides novel ways of organizing projects and tasks within a note-taking system that can link to several other Mac apps. It offers a different subscription model that doesn’t expire purchased features. But it has been out only since the end of 2017, and still suffers from some bugs and limitations.
I’ve been trying it out. I agree with the review - lots of potential, still not quite baked. I’m trying to find a place for it, since it has a fair bit of potential. I tried Noteplan, which was also promising but was too tightly tied to the “one note per day” paradigm. Is anyone else giving this a shot?
I’m still using it irregularly, which is not true of all the software I review. Which is to say, I’m not yet in the habit of keeping running notes on everything, but when I do, I’m tending towards using Agenda to do it.
That said, what’s annoying about it is really annoying. May very well drop it and make a note to come back in 2019.
It looks nice … and has a certain feel to it that I like. But I can’t do islands … have to have iOS or there’s really no point.
Thanks very much Jeff for your review - I might never have found out about this app otherwise. Agenda is a really nice looking app with some neat features and I like a lot about it. It does have some limitations but as mentioned in the review and by Frankns it is the lack of an iOS companion which is the biggest barrier to using it more for me.
However, there is now an iOS beta which seems to be progressing well - so I’m hopeful that this obstacle will soon be overcome.
Been working a bit more with the iOS app. It’s nice to have “formatting flexibility.” Lots of different styles to shape text in any way I might want. Not sure formatting is enough for me to add another tool to the arsenal. Things works well for tasks and it’s growing “integrations” have been pretty impressive. Notes works just fine for 90% of my short capture/documentation. It has a flat learning curve and is subscription - free. Some of Agenda’s iOS commands - how do I delete a project or category - seem obscure. YMMV. And I’m not finding enough “there … there.”
Thanks for the great review. I created some new content and imported some notes from other apps to test Agenda on my Mac. Not having the content on my iOS devices was a big barrier. Now that iOS apps have been rolled out I’m continuing my tests. The apps have a good look and generally a good feel to them. I haven’t figured everything out and have had formatting problems with some earlier notes. The built in forum helps.
So far I’d say Agenda is promising and with more users & input might become a major player in notes/tasks management.
Dale
I’ll add as a late update—a few weeks after my last note, I noticed that my Agenda use had dwindled to extremely rarely, and I took it out of my startup apps. Haven’t much missed it since, although I’ll probably resurrect it if I ever feel the need for a Mac/iOS-only diary app. (I’ve mostly switched to creating OPML files in OmniOutliner, which sync nicely between my Mac and Android phone—haven’t yet plunged into using OO on my iPad, which I’m not entirely sure would sync properly with the above setup.)