Alter Review

Alter is a simple but quite handy tool for those of us trying to keep their life organized. It enables you to copy and paste any text content, before figuring out just how you want the list to be arranged.

To an extent, it's as simple as that. There's a tutorial guiding you through the basics, which is oddly slightly more complex than just using the app, but stick with it. There's the usual choice of controls such as being able to swipe or double-tap an item to send it to the completed side of things, but the beauty is very much in copying and pasting. It doesn't really matter what you copy and paste. Alter figures things out surprisingly well. I used a list of movie titles in my notes folder as well as some text messages, and it figured things out.

It's possible to tweak things around, such as defining where a list starts and ends, easily enabling you to cut out the filler such as an introductory piece within a text. It's also possible to adjust things so that Alter sees a period or comma as a sign of a new item. It's impressive how quickly you can turn a jumble of text into a coherent list, that's just as easy to clear things off from, as you finish the tasks.

There is one crucial issue with Alter, however. You can only have one list a time. I'd have loved to have been able to have multiple lists, covering household things, groceries, work tasks, and more entertaining categories, but everything has to be lumped together.

Hopefully, that's something that comes in a future update as the foundations for Alter are pretty solid and convenient.