bay news 9 breaking news: Meetings for iPhone and Mac review

Friday, April 5, 2013

Meetings for iPhone and Mac review

Meetings is an app for iPhone and Mac by Command Guru that helps you plan, organize, and keep track of your meetings. It features a gorgeous interface and sections for participants, preparation, agenda, discussions, decisions, and tasks.

The layout for Meetings is very simple and easy to use. There's a list of all your meetings, and for each meeting, there are lists for participants, preparation, agenda, discussions, decisions, and tasks. If your meetings do not require all these sections, you can selectively choose which ones are needed for each meeting.

The preparation and task lists are actual checklists that can be checked off and even added to Reminders, Fantastical, or OmniFocus. The other sections are simply numbered lists of text. Unfortunately, the participants list does not connect with Contacts.

The Mac version of Meetings has this really neat "Smart Entry" field that lets quickly type without choose a category first. CMD+E will also take you to the field immediately so you don't have to click it. When you press enter, a menu will pop up with a list of the categories you can add your text to. You can simply click the correct category, or for real speed, type the letter associated with the category. This is awesome for quick entry, but it'd be even more awesome if CMD+(letter) automatically added it to the correct category without ever popping up the list.

The good

Sections for participants, preparation, agenda, discussions, decisions, and tasks
Show only the sections that are relevant, meeting by meeting
Share preparation and task items to Reminders, Fantastical, or OmniFocus (Mac version)
"Smart Entry" lets you quickly add items without lifting your hands from the keyboard (Mac version)
Email meeting details (iPhone version)
Seamlessly and instantly syncs between devices
30 day trial available for Mac version

The bad

Doesn't access or sync with Contacts and Calendar
Can't add files
Can't sync with another user
Can't email (or share in any way) with Mac version
Not available for iPad

The bottom line

Meetings has the potential to be a really great app, but still needs a few more features to become a truly valuable app that you can't live without. The fact that you can only email details from the meeting with the iPhone version is completely baffling and needs to be added to the Mac version ASAP.

The $5 and $20 pricing for the iPhone and Mac versions of Meetings are introductory prices, so if you see the great potential in what Meetings can become, you may want to grab it now before the prices go up. For me, personally, Meetings is already useful, but I can see how it's not quite enough for others.

If you'd like to give Meetings a try before you buy, head to Command Guru's website for a free 30 day trial.