InnerList Review

My life can be a seething stew of chaos, so naturally I’ve been searching for a good general task/to-do list program for a bit now. But with the plethora of programs already out there, it’s really hard to know exactly where to start looking. Because of that, the opportunity to review InnerList actually came as quite a welcome treat. Unfortunately, while it’s a decent enough program, I find that it’s lacking enough in a few crucial areas that I may have to continue my quest a bit longer.

InnerList comes in three different tiers: Limited (supporting a maximum of five lists), Basic (unlimited lists), and Premium (attaching pictures to Notes and setting reminder alerts and deadlines for Tasks). Limited is what users get in the main free download, with Basic and Premium upgrades being available via in-app purchase. As of this writing, these are both available for free for a limited time. You might want to strike while the iron is hot, because without these additional features InnerList is unfortunately not that robust. For the purposes of this review, however, we’ll be looking at the full Premium feature set.

There are three different kinds of lists available in InnerList: Notes, Tasks, and People. Tasks are what we typically think of when a to-do list comes to mind. Notes are more or less like Tasks, except they have a large text field and (with Premium) include the ability to attach pictures. However, the trade-off for pictures is that Notes don’t get the reminders and deadlines options. Finally, People gives you the ability to make lists of, well, people. You can add brand new folks or pull them from your Contacts list. Pretty straightforward, though it lacks a lot of info fields that the Contact version has.

InnerList is a pretty good starting point, but it still feels like it lacks some features that would seem a natural extension of its core design. For instance, the reminders can be set to go off daily at a specific time, but when an item is checked off as completed they don’t reset the next day and remain checked off forever. But if I uncheck an item manually, it resets and removes the reminders that were previously set. This seems like a huge oversight. It would also be nice to be able to pick a different ringtone for the reminders, rather than using the basic iOS chime. And while you can synch your lists with Dropbox in order to recover them on another device, any pictures attached to a Note will not transfer. This is another one of those seemingly basic things you would just take for granted in a backup, especially when doing so via a platform like Dropbox. [NOTE: After speaking with the developer I have been assured that images attached to Notes do indeed synch between devices via Dropbox, but apparently it can take a bit of time for them to show up, so you'll need to be patient.]

InnerList isn’t bad, but even with full upgrades it still feels very limited in what it can do and how the user experience can be tailored. The developers are on the right track, but it could have benefited from more feedback and a bit more time in development.