Parker Planner Review – A Single Place to Manage Your Life

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The digital era has signaled the end of many companies, newspapers are the ones bearing the major upheaval as people change the way they consume their news but another industry that is having to re-structure is the paper diary and planning industry as the number of people who have diaries and paper calendars continues to reduce.

One company that is looking to adapt to the changing market is Parker Planners who not only continue to sell the paper variety of planners but have now launched an iPhone version of their planner and for a paper company moving into the technology space they’ve done a pretty good job.

The default view of Parker Planner when you launch it displays not only the day’s calendar but also your todo list and a notes section to jot down ideas that come to you during the day. This is a lot of information to fit onto an iPhone but it works well and gives you instant access to all your key daily information.

The navigation bar across the bottom of the screen give you quick access to 5 different views of your information, you can see your calendar in week and month view as well as the default day view, while there are also links to page views of all of your tasks and notes.

Navigation needs to be easy and intuitive with any calendar app and Parker Planner certainly meets those requirements. Swiping left and right across the top of the screen will jump a day forward and back, while taps of the screen will enable to to edit existing items or add new tasks, notes and meetings.

The week and month views are possible the weakest part of Parker Planner but then again considering the constraints of the limited real estate it’s never easy to get a week or month’s worth of data on to it.

Both these views do give you easy ability to navigate and view large amounts of time/data though and at any time a quick tap of any date will bring up the day view that will show all the data that you need. From all screen though you can quickly jump back to today or any given day using the Today and Jump To buttons.

The calendar integrates seamlessly with your iPhone’s calendars and if you sync your iPhone calendar with your Google calendar or Outlook it will automatically sync with Parker Planner in both directions.

Tasks and notes don’t synchronise with any desktop view though which would have been nice, there is also no iPad version of the app yet and it would be great to see what they could achieve with the additional real estate that the iPad offers.

One of the best things about Parker Planner though is the price point. At $2.99 it’s clearly cheaper than many of the alternatives and works great as a single place to manage your life.

[rating: 4/5]

What we like

  • Easy navigation
  • Packs a lot of information
  • Calendar sync
  • Great price

What to know

  • No Tasks or Notes sync
  • Busy week and month views

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