Post-it Notes may be a product of the analog era, but they continue to stick around – literally, that is – covering walls, windows, monitor screens and more, remaining an office worker’s go-to-tool for small scribbles, quick thoughts, and ideas. Now the company behind Post-it, 3M, is hoping to port Post-it notes to the small screen, with a new mobile app that lets you capture, organize and share your notes from your iPhone or iPad.
The new app will be especially helpful for documenting collaboration sessions at work – the kind that leave the walls covered in colorful little stickies.
3M should be applauded for doing more than throwing out some lame alternative to using your phone’s camera to snap photos of Post-it’s, slapping the brand name on it and calling it a day. Instead, the Post-it Plus app, as it’s called, is surprisingly clever.
You can use the app to capture a photo of up to 50 square Post-it Notes at one time. These are then identified with little checkmarks on top of each note. Before creating your digital board, you can uncheck the notes you don’t want to save.
After the image is captured, you have a viral Post-it board where you can arrange, refine and re-organize the notes just by tapping and dragging them around with your finger.
The app lets you tap on the board for more options, like renaming the group of notes or choosing different arrangements for your notes, including a couple of grid-like patterns that stretch either horizontally or vertically. Or, if you want to return to the way the notes were positioned when you first snapped the photo, that’s also an option.
Meanwhile, individual notes can be rotated, brightened up, favorited and deleted after tapping on them to see them larger. But you can’t re-write the notes themselves.
Multiple boards can also be combined, allowing teams to work together on ideas. When you’re finished with an arrangement, you tap to either share the board via text, email, social media or other apps you use like Dropbox or Evernote, or you can export the board to PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, .zip or the Post-it Plus app’s own file type.
The free app is currently featured as one of the Best New Apps on the iTunes App Store today, and it doesn’t include any in-app purchases. (Hooray!) For those whose workflows still live and die by these little notes, Post-it Plus is worth the download.