The web is full of apps to help you get organized and stay on track, but Springpad stands out for its complete and utter flexibility. Basically, springpads are online notebooks. You can choose from a variety of pre-made springpads, or make your own from scratch. You can also share the information on your springpads with other friends who use the service.

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to review Springpad, since I’ve actually been using it for the past few months.  I use it primarily for two things: tracking apps we plan to review for Useful Tools and for planning meals. The springpad I use to track apps I designed myself. It consists of a list of apps with links to the corresponding web site, and each app is tagged by category and by whether somebody submitted it to us (these usually get a higher priority) or by whether I found it on my own.  Filtering the list is easy-just click on the corresponding tags.

The meal planner springpad is also quite useful.  You can save a list of recipes you like, put them on a calendar, and print a shopping list that contains the ingredients to those recipes.  Clipping recipes and other information from the Internet is fast and simple thanks to Springpad’s bookmarklet, which lets you specify what you’re clipping-whether it’s a note, a recipe or a product-tag it and direct it to the appropriate springpad. If you use the meal planner, I highly recommend tagging your recipes (by course, type of food, etc) as you add them-this will make sorting through them much simpler.

There are also to-do list springpads,  springpads for home decorating projects, planning trips, and much more. Making your own custom springpad is easy, too-in the screenshots, you can see me making one for my fall garden. You can add any combination of lists, tasks, alarms, products, and information clipped from the web. You can also upload your own files.

So, for example, if I wanted to use the “Pet Health” tracker, I could upload and store my dog’s shot records, add an alarm to remind me to make an appointment when they are due again, save links for cheap pet meds online, etc.

Springpad’s user interface is, overall,  good. It looks nice and it’s easy to navigate. The main problem with the service is that it can be glitchy-for example, I once lost a springpad because I tried to add another tab bar to it. That was frustrating.  Then, there were some issues with dragging and dropping items from the “My Stuff” tab into a springpad. Also frustrating! Additionally,  a while back I had an issue where every time I added a recipe, it added itself in triplicate, thus clogging up my recipe list.  I should note that all of these issues have now been resolved.

However, Springpad’s customer support, handled through Get Satisfaction, is excellent. Katin, the Springpad representative who handles customer questions and problems,  is awesome! I’ve never posted a question without getting a response back quickly, usually within an hour or two, even on weekends.  The service itself is constantly improving-it’s now much faster and less glitchy than it was when I started using it. Plus, Springpads are now portable, since they’ve added a mobile app.

Come to think of it, I guess that’s why I was waiting to review Springpad-to give them a chance to live up to their potential for awesomeness!

What do you think of Springpads? Let us know in the comments!

Our Rating of Springpad

Tags: Productivity

Categories:web