It’s Productivity Week here at iPhone.AppStorm, and all week we’re going to have app reviews and how-tos, all based on getting things done. Plus, we’ll even pull some classic reviews out of the archives. Stay tuned all week!
Weave is an unusual and cool task management app. It appeared on the App Store recently, and being free, there’s no excuse not to try it. It combines tasks, projects, money and time tracking all in a single application, making it easy to manage tasks and keep up with the time you use and money you spend (or earn). Let’s get into it after the break.
Getting Started
First time you launch Weave, you will be asked to sign up. This is required but worth it, since it allows you to back up your data and recover it easily. After you’ve signed up, Weave will introduce you to the app with a nice interactive tutorial, which I think is a great touch since it walks you through the main features of the app in a cool way.
Signing Up and Weave's Tutorial
A Look At My Day And Tasks
Weave provides us with a list of things one needs to do today. You get a list of tasks that are due soon, and a list of projects that are incomplete.
A look at My Day
From here, adding a To-Do is as simple as tapping the “+” sign on the toolbar at the top, and choosing Add Todo. Here, just write a description for the task and add an optional due date. You can also add the time spent on the task, although adding it when you’re just creating the task doesn’t make much sense to me. There’s also an option to assign the task to a project, but I’ll get to that later.
Adding a To-Do
Marking a task as done lets you register an expense or income, and add time spent on that task. Registering an expense or income is very practical since you can later see all of your incomes and expenses for every task. Registering time spent on a task is only practical when the task is assigned to a project though, since there is no list of “time spent” on all tasks (the idea behind time tracking here is for projects).
Incomes and Expenses are not limited to projects and tasks. You can add them directly if you want to keep track of them without creating tasks or assigning them to projects. Simply tap the “+” sign mentioned before, and choose Add Expense or Add Income. You can later see a list of these on your Dashboard as well.
Marking a task as done and assigning an expense to it
Projects
Weave also lets you manage projects. Creating a project is as easy as creating a task: tap on the “+” sign on the toolbar at the top and choose Add Project. Projects allow you to keep track of time and money. You can have a task that represents an expense or income, or one that took a certain amount of time. This way you can know how much the project cost and took. Now, you don’t need to associate a task to an income or an expense, you can add transactions directly, for example, to set a budget. The project page will show you all tasks left, how much of the project is done, how much time was spent and a list of transactions at the bottom.
Details of a project and adding an income
Adding a Todo to a project can be achieved in two ways. From the project’s page, you can tap the Todo button on the bottom toolbar, or from any other section (the My Day section, for instance), then tap on the “+” sign, choose Add Todo, enter the task’s details and on the bottom tap Assign to a Project.
The Dashboard
When you launch Weave, you’re taken to the My Day section, but there’s another section on the app (which has no name really, I just call it Dashboard), where you can have quicker access to some of the app’s functions. You can go directly to the My Day section, or you can see a list of your to-dos or projects. I personally like the My Day view better, but having a list of tasks may be a better option for some.
Weave's dashboard and To-Dos list
From the Dashboard, you can also see a list of incomes and expenses, and the grand totals. This includes entries recorded on projects and tasks, and also entries that are not associated to anything, so you get a nice view of where your money is going.
List of incomes and expenses
Settings
The app’s settings are accessible from the Dashboard. From here, you can change your password or log out, export your data to a CSV file (which I found to be very practical) and customize task alerts. Weave will alert you daily if you have any tasks due, but you can customize the days you are alerted and even the time of the day. There are also per-task alerts, which are also customizable, and if you don’t like being reminded at all, you can turn off all alerts.
Weave's settings and alerts configuration
Final Thoughts
Weave is a different task manager, but a very good one. The fact that it’s free makes it that much good against most of its competitors. Most free task managers always lack some functionality, or don’t work very well, but Weave works like a charm, has all the needed functionality and none of the expensive extras I personally never use. The interface is very nice, although some parts of the app disappointed me a little (when assigning an expense to a task, you get an interface that’s rather ugly compared to the overall design and color scheme).
One of the upsides of the app is that everything is backed up on the cloud, so you don’t need to worry about deleting the app accidentally or anything like that. Considering all this, I rate the app pretty highly, and encourage you to try it out. It’s free after all, so what do you have to lose?