While you can add all your friends’ birthdays to your calendar, if you just want to see a list of birthdays, your calendar app is going to make that a job of work, no matter how organized you are. Besides Notes or a good ol’ sheet of paper, organizing of all of your friends’ birthdays, your favorite team’s games or your work deadlines isn’t easy.
Pronto isn’t a calendar, though. More of a reminder app, Pronto gives you a place to organize all your big events. With the ability to create alarms and add to-do lists, this trimmed down little app packs a pretty big organizational punch.
Making a Special Occasion
Get started by tapping the plus sign in the bottom left corner. That’s not going to create a new event, but rather an event list. Pronto lets you organize your events however you’d like; currently I have a list for birthdays, another for my appointments and a third for deadlines. It’s really up to you to decide how best to separate out your events.
Create an event list and some events to go in it.
Once you’ve got an event list, tap it to start adding events. The same plus sign will let you create an event within a list. Give your event a title and select a date. If you want Pronto to remind you on or around the big day, tap the bell to create an alarm. The loop icon will give the option of creating a repeating event, helpful for birthdays, holidays or anything else you do regularly.
If you want to add a to-do to an event, give it a tap. Type out whatever you’d like and hit Done. A checkbox will appear next to your text. While this feature is meant to keep track of to-do lists, you can really write anything you want here, even using it as a place to keep notes.
You can create alarms and to-do lists attached to events.
Unfortunately, when you tap off of the event, your to-do disappears. If you want to find it, you’ll have to tap the event again. This makes it difficult to keep track of event to-do lists at a glance.
To edit or delete, well, anything, whether it’s an event, an event list or a to-do, swipe horizontally. A trash can will appear next to the item and the text will become editable. If you’re editing an event, all the event creation features will reopen, and you can change the date, the alarm and the frequency.
Nice and Light
Pronto’s slick interface reinforces its commitment to its core function; there aren’t any extraneous features. Pronto’s going to do one job for you: organize your events. It’s not a calendar, so don’t get confused here. You won’t be able to set appointments; beyond the date, you can’t attach a time of day to events.
While good for birthdays and holidays, Pronto doesn’t allow you to add a time to appointments.
Never satisfied, there are a couple of things I would have liked to have, though. I’m fine without calendar syncing, because again, that’s outside the scope of Pronto, but it would be nice to share events via email or messaging.
I’d also have like a more accessible event notation feature that allowed me to add comments that remain visible. My to-do list just got lost as soon as it was created, and I forgot they were there entirely. The sad truth is that a to-do list is only useful if you actually see it, and Pronto’s hidden to-do lists felt like an afterthought. While I absolutely appreciated the simplicity of Pronto, the utter lack of features outside simple event creation left something to be desired.
Pronto was pretty nice to look at, but besides being good looking, it’s also purple. Everything is purple. And while my childhood bedroom was as purple as the next eight year old’s, all that purple is going to rub some people the wrong way. I know I would have liked a choice of colors after thirty minutes of staring at a purple screen. Just a few different themes for Pronto, selectable it the app preferences, would make all the difference.
Conclusion
I really liked using Pronto a lot, and despite the sheer amount of purple, it was well designed and nice to use. While there are a few features I would like to have seen, I get that Pronto has a single function — event management — and is sticking to it. I have a calendar app that I use religiously, but Pronto is a good place to go to get quick, at-a-glance info on the larger events in your life.
Though it’s definitely not going to take the place of your regular calendar, Pronto is a good go to for managing all the important things that happen to you, especially the stuff that happens over and over again. If you can see past the purple, Pronto is a nice app doing a good job of event organization.