WorkFlowy: Note, List, Outline

I've been using Workflowy for about 5 years and I pay the subscription fee every year. I use this app as a first step in the writing process and not for tasks. Functionally, it's great. Simple and fast to capture ideas. You can easily move sections around (on web platform) and the export function is decent. It's cross platform since it resides on web. The bad: As a paying customer I expected more attention to improving the features and customizations. Why do you not support markup? Why can't I selectively change font color, size or imbed images? Why can't I change background color? The ugly: This app has been left untouched for a long, long while. What the heck?! One annoying part of the functionality is the floating bar that always pops up over the words I'm trying to type. It would be nice to 3D touch on a bullet point and have to option to indent or de indent or move it etc. The app lacks severely the same functionality as the web app. At $50 bucks a year, and no sign of development, im kinda wondering if it's worth it. Hopefully we start seeing some action from the developer. I know from reading the reviews that some of us like to actually support the developer of good apps with our cash, but we also want to see continuous improvement and functionality.

In all my years with Apple this is my first review. I'm a productivity and GTD guy and I've tried a lot of tools. I usually end up back at Evernote trying to force "the Secret Weapon", because tasks become projects and you usually need more than a task manager, which Evernote is not. Don't get me wrong, couldn't live without EN. I almost dismissed WF out of the gate due to the old school look and feel, but the simplicity is really what you need. You can draft agenda's, story's, keep team notes, personnel notes, account notes, task or projects lists, any list. You can infinity expand and and use tags. The clincher for me was that you can share or just copy/paste to word and the bullet points transfer perfectly. So your not trapped in the app. I use it from the web on my work laptop and on my iPad and iPhone via the app. Michael Hyatt has it right, everything seems to start on WF now for me.

WorkFlowy is a program I have left and returned to a couple of times. Now, again, I am using the app daily. That says I can’t replace the app though I have been enticed with more complex or structured to do apps as enough for my work. WorkFlowy’s ease of use, availability across devices, flexible tags, and speed captures ideas and details in a way that fills a creative and thought gap that the other more structured organizational apps do not. When I return to WorkFlowy after trying other apps says that I can’t replace it with fancier or more expensive options. It is working well. Now I have leaned into WorkFlowy strengths and doing that has helped me to settle on the other pieces I need for structure more easily and to stop hopping around. The recent update has been excellent. I like the program and the developers’ responsiveness. Great job. Easy to recommend.

This app has been dormant for many years. People, including me, stuck with the app so that someday it will be up to the expectations. The blog posts, zen desk page has many requests unanswered and ignored. I will only talk about the mobile app below. This is NOT a native iOS app so the user experience is not good. It’s hard to navigate, go in edit mode etc. You might as well just open this in Safari and you should be good, except if you care offline support If you are a pro member then you are not getting money’s worth. For the same price or less you will get some great notetaking and todo apps. Themes on desktop are not available on mobile. Unfortunately Workflowy like outlining is not available anywhere except a few clones that don’t do a good job. It took them few years just to add the ability to change Fonts, and then few months to introduce swipe completion/deletion. The website on Safari may load faster than the app itself. As you would find in most native apps, there are widgets and 3-D touch support. This app don’t. The whole theme of Workflowy is using the tags. There is not auto suggestion on tags as you would find it on desktop. It makes really hard to add a tag and be consistent. There is no share feature but I don’t use it. They are planning to add it. Overall this app is good for quickly looking up something on the go.

I am a subscriber and active user of the full version for Windows. So far I have found the iOS version to be a good balance between usability and familiarity. I can, in a comfortable and natural way, access the common features I need to use. While a lot of users feel that it is missing some of the power user features of the desktop version, I prefer that over the somewhat awkward Rube Goldberg approach taken by HandyFlowy, the iOS clone that has the power-features, but in a package with a ton of hieroglyphic buttons. With iOS, you don't have all the same controls that you have in the Windows environment. I'm certainly open to a full feared version in iOS, but perfect one that preserves the elegant simplicity where the functionality isn't in your face, but rather hidden in the keyboard commands.