Review: IFTTT's Do Note Automates Note-Taking

Service providers struggling with development languages and platforms might do well to look into mobile apps from IFTTT that simplify the automation of common mobile-device tasks and can make a VAR look like a programming genius.

For customers looking to store some notes as items on a to-do list, others as calendar events and still others in a personal journal, IFTTT's Do Note can do all that and more with a single interface. Its maker, whose name comes from the phrase "if this, then that," develops versions for Android and for iPhone and iPad, both of which are free.

To understand Do Note, it's helpful first to understand some IFTTT parlance. A Channel is any supported Web service (such as Dropbox) against which an action can be taken (like posting a pic). An automated task between two Channels or from a mobile app to a Channel is called a Recipe. There are IF Recipes, which are triggered by performing an action such as taking a picture, and Do Recipes, which do something immediately such as saving some text in Evernote.

After you install the app and create a free account, Do Note gets things going by emailing a sample recipe. This automated task is called "Email a note to myself." Tapping it brings up a blank page, a soft keyboard and a send icon. Simply type or speak a message, tap the send icon and voila! The note is sent to the address used at registration.

To add a new recipe, tap the mortar and pestle icon (which I'd argue more aptly implies a prescription than a recipe, but I digress). Tapping the icon brings up a list of existing recipes and buttons for adding new ones. The add button brings up collections of pre-built recipes categorized as essentials, home, work, play and families.

Tapping one of these lists recipe templates that allow quick creation of automated tasks involving more than 100 supported channels, including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, GitHub, Facebook, Yammer, all Google apps and services, and loads more.

There's plenty of overlap between each category's recipe templates. For example, most template categories include some variety of the "Post to Facebook" template tailored for posts to the social network for home, work and play.

Since we often add calendar items as reminders, we created a recipe for that task first. After a one-time grant of permission to Do Note to manage our Google Calendar (or others we're connected with), the app presented the same simple interface as with the email recipe, but with a calendar icon. Do Note uses Google's "Quick Add" plain-language syntax to add calendar items, and prompts that phrases like "Lunch with John Friday at 12 pm" are perfectly OK.

We tested the reaches of Google's syntax by entering "meeting with Dell tomorrow at noon." A few seconds after tapping send, a positive feedback sound played and a "meeting with Dell" was on the Google Calendar at the right time on the right day.

Next we tested its ability to post a tweet, something we do often from the office, but not often from mobile devices. For Twitter, Do Note includes three pre-built recipes: a quick tweet, quick tweet with location and for performing quick updates to one's bio. The quick tweet recipe after validating my Twitter account worked perfectly out of the gate.

Creating a recipe is simply a matter of selecting the channel from which to trigger an action, selecting an action from the list of those supported, and choosing the channel on which the action should take place.

For our test, we chose Gmail as the originating channel, selected an incoming email from a particular sender as the trigger, and instructed the app to increase the volume on my Android device to 100 percent. Connecting with the Android device caused IFTTT's free IF app to be installed there. Everything worked as expected, and the recipe was created and tested in less than 10 minutes.

Anyone who'd like a single interface for sending text to multiple channels will benefit from Do Note. It'd be nice if it would save more than three recipes at a time, but creating new ones takes just a few seconds. For quick tweets, calendar entries and other text-based tasks, Do Note saves lots of time with a minimal investment of time. There's also a vibrant recipe sharing community that can be leveraged by end-users and solution providers alike.

PUBLISHED APRIL 1, 2015