When they were announced, the widgets in iOS 8 sounded like they had huge potential. But then iOS 8 came out and, well, all of the widgets sort of sucked. Until this one.
Neato is a super simple note-taking widget does exactly one thing: let you take down notes from the Notification Center. After a 10 second set up, you just swipe down, and leave yourself reminders. That’s pretty useful!
It gets better. Neato also integrates with Dropbox and Evernote so that you can save all of your on-the-go notes in the same place you save your other stuff with just two taps. Even better? You can also turn notes into emails, tweets, or text messages just as quickly. Once you get into the habit of it, Neato could be your one-stop shop for all kinds of correspondence.
We did find a couple of downsides in our quick test — but only a couple. First of all, the keyboard is built by the app developer, so it’s ever so slightly different than the regular iOS keyboard. This is pretty easy to get used to. Second, there is no text selection or copy/paste function in the notes, so if you notice a mistake three sentences too late, you either have to leave it or delete everything you just typed. It’s unclear if this is something that will be fixed in an update.
So there you have it: iOS widgets are useful after all. If you like Neato, you might also try out Heapo, a clipboard management app by the same developer, or Clips, another app that lets you copy/paste anywhere. [iTunes]