iPad App Review: Complete Class Organizer (by Rosario Jameson)

Jim Fisher — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 23:41:21 GMT

This past semester, I evaluated several note taking applications for the iPad and have come to the conclusion that the best all-in-one app is "Complete Class Organizer" (henceforth to be referred to as "CCO") by AnimalBrainz Inc. For someone like me, who suffers from intolerable deficiencies in their note-taking skills, it's a godsend. I used it for the first time in a class which was almost 100% lecture. It definitely made the difference between an "A" and some other, less "A"-ish grade. I highly recommend that anyone taking classes consider this, primarily because I've seen no other apps that offer as much as this one does.

At the same time, CCO has a few places where it comes up short. Understand, I actively use CCO so my identification of these items shouldn't be taken as derogatory feedback but rather as a constructive review. It's my hope that the designers of CCO will address some of these improvements in future releases, making the app fulfill more completely its purpose. Also, this article isn't meant to be a comparison between competing apps. It is a review of CCO, but to illustrate the room for improvement I point to another app: AudioNote. AudioNote is really good in its own right, but it is a more focused tool and lacks the more holistic approach to classroom organization that CCO has.

The Features:

Organization
CCO helps you organize your notes by class and by individual note taking sessions within a class. This provides a handy place to register important information about the class itself, such as your instructor's contact information, class location, and online syllabus. Likewise, it helps to keep your notes organized. Nothing is more frustrating than digging through a mound of files trying to locate the notes for a specific lecture and CCO helps to solve this in a natural, intuitive way.
Audio synchronization with typed notes
This is, by far, the most impressive and useful feature in CCO. CCO will not only allow you to record the lecture while you are typing, but when reviewing your notes, you can select a word and hit "Play Audio" to begin playing the lecture at exactly the point where you were typing that word. Very nice. Really, I don't know how I ever managed to live through a lecture class without this excellent feature. For note taking, I use the ZAGGmate which integrates seamlessly. In fact, I find CCO and this case/keyboard very complimentary.
For the typed notes and lecture synchronization aspects of CCO, I see only some small room for improvement, and this is apparent only because I shopped around: AudioNote's version of this highlights the word or graphical stroke you were making as the playback progresses. Without this in CCO, I find that I sometimes get lost and end up clicking on words and restarting playback periodically so that I can reorient myself with the lecture. It's a small distinction and not something I can really hold against CCO. It's just a bell or whistle that could make it that much better.
Drawings
In addition to typing text, you can also create pages to capture hand-drawn diagrams. Used with a stylus such as the Pogo Sketch, this has a lot of potential which I don't think is fully realized. In this regard, AudioNote outshines CCO for the simple reason that drawings can be made in line with typed text. Conversely, CCO launches a special "graphic" note page to capture drawings, which you then close and return to typing, losing a bit of context in the process. As mentioned above, AudioNote's "highlight during playback" feature will highlight each stroke as it was drawn in relation to the recorded lecture. So CCO's approach to hand-drawn notes is a little weak. For many classes, like history or political science courses, this is probably not a significant shortcoming, but for mathematics and engineering courses, an integrated graphics option is a must have. I wouldn't consider using CCO for these sorts of classes until this is addressed. If I had to rank missing core features that I'd like to see added, this would be my number one, leaving all others far behind.
Import PDFs and Word .DOC files
Having the ability to import PDFs is really good for making sure that all your class content is readily available, and the ability to import Word .doc files is even more beneficial. This is particularly useful for annotating an existing documents by, for example, adding detail to a supplied lecture outline.
As I said previously, this review isn't meant to be a comparison between AudioNote and CCO, but since I've spent time holding AudioNote up as a standard in the previous bullets, I feel compelled to state: AudioNote does NOT have anything like this.
Even so, there is also room for improvement in CCO: The .doc import feature is a little wonky. It seems to have a problem handling Word's numbered lists in roman numeral format: the roman numerals just aren't imported. Also, indentations of lists disappear when imported as well, which tends to make a mess out of outlines. This was bothersome enough for me that I manually went in and revised a "Master Lecture Outline" Word document, converting roman numerals to standard numbers, then spent time putting all of the indentations back into place after import. Also, the more recent .docx format is not supported. So... again, wonky.
The PDF version of the master outline imported fine and looked great, but PDF's are read-only as you might expect. Rumor has it that editing of PDFs might be in the app's future.
Dropbox support
As of version 1.5, CCO has Dropbox support. This is a welcome addition to the CCO feature list since reading and writing to Dropbox is a much better mechanism than e-mailing documents to and from your workstation. It makes loading and sending notes and other documents a lot simpler than the previous means of email.
Grade tracking
There is a well-intentioned screen for keeping track of your grades. It was designed on the back of concepts such as "percentages" and "weightings" which can be, I suppose, a versatile way of modeling scores. While the screen looks promising, I found it almost entirely unusable. In the vast majority, teachers distribute grades using a point scoring system, indicating scores in a "47 out of 50 for assignment X" fashion. I've known very few teachers that provided numbers in the fashion CCO seems to accept. As such, using this screen to keep track of your score requires some up front effort to calculate what the "weight" of an assignment on your overall score (percentage of total class points), then to calculate the percentage of your earned grade. Not impossible, sure, but I expect computers to do dumb stuff like this for me. Also, when entering in a percentage, it is impossible to re-enter a value of 100%. Once changed, input can only be entered as 0 - 99. Finally, I've not found a way to elegantly manage this approach to support "extra credit work" which raises your score but does not adversely impact your grade if not done. So... I think this feature needs work.

A Few Stability Problems:

Failure to launch recording
There are a few stability issues which I suspect are memory defects in the app itself. Several times, when I press the record button, I'm presented with a message box indicating that I have no more room for recordings, and that I should delete pictures to make space. On review I found that I actually have over 40 GB of space free and the app is just confused. Killing it from memory and restarting always resolves this issue, but losing the first part of several lectures trying to resolve this is quite frustrating. Despite what may seem like criticism, I really like this application and I am rooting for it, so understand that I'm jesting when I say that CCO will sometimes self-correct this condition by blowing up and shutting down on its own. Restarting it makes recordings possible again.
Periodic blow ups
These are real, but thankfully they are sparse. To date, most of my note taking sessions have occurred without incident. I suspect, based on experience, that these blowups are related to memory issues stemming from importing .doc files. It's only guesswork, but the app seems to become unstable after importing these files. A dramatic side effect of this is that the current recording, if actively in progress, is lost when this occurs. As such, I find that its good practice to stop and restart long recordings, breaking them into pieces.

I feel guilty about ranking this app a 3 out of 5 stars (or as CCO would put it, 60% with a 100% weighting). This is because I really like it and wouldn't dream of taking another lecture class without it. If all of the above details were taken care of, it would be a 5 hands down. It's a testament to how useful I've found it in my day-to-day class work that I still recommend it despite a couple of impactful bugs, but I definitely do and look forward to seeing improvements in the app itself.

iPad Apps

iPad App Review: Complete Class Organizer (by Rosario Jameson)