Staying organized in school can be pretty difficult. You have to keep up with homework, papers, projects, tests and all sorts of stuff. Sometimes pen and paper can do the job quite well, but it’s not for us techies. I personally prefer to be able to use my iPhone to stay on schedule, and finding apps that are just for that can be quite difficult.
Here’s where inClass comes in. By letting you set terms, courses, teachers, tasks and even take text, audio and video notes during lectures, it makes your school life a whole lot easier. More after the jump.
Getting started
First thing we need to do is to set up our term. In order to add assignments or take notes, you need to have some courses configured. Doing so is easy: tapping on the bottom right tab takes you to the list of terms. inClass comes with one preconfigured, so tap on “Edit” to add courses.
Setting up your first term
Tapping on “Add New Course” lets you configure a new course, where you can set the name, code, color, location, schedules and the instructor. Note that you can configure multiple class types, like lectures or labs, with different locations, schedules and instructors for each one.
Creating a course and adding an instructor
Calendar View
Looking at your schedule is great on this app. Simply tap on the lower left corner tab and you’ll get a view of what courses you have for the day, and even due dates for assignments or projects.
Day and Month Views
The best comes by rotating your device to landscape. This way you get a full-screen calendar showing you everything for the week, which is the view I like most, since it’s easier to know what you have the next few days. Swiping left or right here lets you switch weeks.
Rotating the device to landscape mode reveals a week calendar
Taking Notes
Probably the best feature of this app is the ability to take notes. Going to the “Notes” tab and pressing the plus button let’s you start a new one, where you can add text directly using the keyboard (which I don’t find very comfortable, although maybe a bluetooth keyboard would do the trick).
You can also add voice notes, take pictures with your camera (like pictures of the whiteboard for instance), shoot video and even attach files such as PDFs. The latter feature isn’t as comfortable as the rest, since you need to upload the files to your iPhone using iTunes File Sharing first. You can open them from another app (like the iPhone Dropbox App), but it doesn’t let you attach them to any note, it just creates a new one with the file already attached.
Taking notes and exporting them
You can also export your notes 3 different ways: by email, on Facebook and via iTunes File Sharing. This lets you have your audio notes and pictures on your computer when you want to study, which is more comfortable than watching (or hearing) them on the device.
Keeping track of tasks
The app also lets you keep track of all your To-Dos. Tapping on the “Tasks” tab on the bottom takes you to a list of all your tasks, sorting them by Course, Date and Priority. Adding a new task lets you select the course to which the task belongs, the task type (you can choose between Homework, Paper, Project, Exam, Midterm and Final), a due date, whether it’s a one-time, weekly or monthly task, and an alarm. You can also add some notes to the task, and assign a priority.
Adding and listing tasks
Settings
There’s not much to customize for this app. The settings pane lets you change the recording quality settings for audio and video. By default, the app records audio and shoots video in standard definition, which can be changed to HD quality. There’s also an option to backup all data and send it as an email, which is pretty useful sometimes.
Adding and listing tasks
Apart from that, you can also link your Facebook account in order to share notes on the social network.
Conclusion
Overall, this is a great app for all of us still in school. It’s simple to use and provides all the needed functionality. The note-taking feature is very good and handy, and I would say it’s this app’s killer feature. The interface is still a little rusty, and I think it could be improved, plus it crashed on me once while adding a task. Despite not being perfect, inClass is pretty good and works on both iPhone and iPad, which is pretty awesome if you ask me. In any case, it’s free, but, as you may have seen on the pictures, ad-supported, although they can be removed for $0.99 as a limited offer via In-App Purchase.
Any personal experience with inClass? Let us know in the comments!