Google Calendar and Outlook’s scheduling tools get the job done, but there’s nothing exactly thrilling or enjoyable about using them. Even most software planners available on the market today do little more than replicate their paper-based versions, offering little in the way of creative use of connected tech and digital media. That’s why Czechoslovakia-based Moredays created its web app, which launched in October of 2011, and why the company is taking a big step forward this week with the release of its new iPad application.
Moredays is a calendaring application that’s designed to be about more than just productivity. It incorporates features like stamps to attach visual cues to activities and events. Users can also attach pictures to days and events, from their device’s gallery or its camera, or use built-in sketches provided by Moredays. It ends up turning daily planning into a visually rich scrapbook, preserving memories while also provide GTD functionality.
Moredays founder Filip Molcan explained in an interview that while the app debuted on the web, it is actually probably a much better fit for the iPad. Molcan said that the web-first release was designed to help the company take the pulse of its user-base, and pave the way for its mobile app releases.
“We need the web-app as the core for synchronization with our mobile apps,” he said. “Also, we wanted to get some feedback from our users to know if we are on the right way. We now have our iPad app, and we’ll release an iPhone app in a couple of weeks and an Android app in a couple of months. We think that the iPad format is the right one for this type of application.”
Like the web app, the Moredays iPad app is free to download and use, and for basic service, it will remain that way. However, Molcan said the company hopes to introduce its freemium model later this year once the mobile apps are released. Moredays should have a decent starting pool to work from in terms of converting users to paid customers, since Molcan reports that it already has 30,000 members signed up from its web-based beta launch, and he says that feedback indicates many are waiting for mobile offerings before joining up.
Moredays is a good-looking app with an approach that’s part Bento file creation too, part Evernote cloud-based notebook, part iCal and Address Book, and part to-do list. It’ll face challenges in terms of convincing users of all those types of services to adopt something new, but it also presents a nicely organized way of accomplishing a variety of tasks at the same time in the same place. We’ll see if it can not only grow its user base with its mobile platform expansion, but also offer attractive features to convince those users to also become paying customers.