Image rights: Shihab Mehboob.Allegory was one of the Ľrst apps to take
advantage of Catalyst, the set of tools Apple
launched last year to allow developers to
easily port iPadOS apps to the Mac. It’s
a note–taking app that supports standard
Markdown, as well as its own version
of Markdown, RTF, and HTML. Notes can
also be exported as a PDF.
Allegory prides itself on simplicity, so
the Ľrst thing you will notice when you
create a new note is that there’s nothing on
screen but the blank note itself. This can be
a little disconcerting, but a combination of
menu items and right–clicking on the note
gives you access to the tools you need to
format notes and add images or drawings.
\ou can even extract the text from images
and insert it in a note as text using the app’s
inbuilt optical character recognition feature.
The heart of Allegory is Dashboard, and
it’s here that its iOS and iPad OS roots are
clearly visible. On a touchscreen interface
swiping over the front–most note to cycle
through recent notes works well, but it feelsAllegory 1.2.8
This note–taking app has good features but big omissions
Free (IAPs) From Shihab Mehboob, allegoryapp.info
Needs macOS 10.15 or laterALLEGORY 1.2.8
Can extract text from
imported images
Lots of customization
options
Behaved erratically
No support for tagging
OKAYstrange doing it with a mouse on the Mac.
Equally, the Dashboard layout is Ľne in iOS,
but doesn’t make use of the Mac’s extra
screen space. We prefer the approach of apps
like Bear, where the right of the window
displays the current note, with other notes
shown in one sidebar and tags in another.
Speaking of tags, Allegory’s support is
limited to setting due dates and bookmarking
notes. \ou can’t use tags to organize notes
the way you can in other apps.
While you can organize notes in folders,
the method is unintuitive — you can’t must
drag a note onto a folder. Also, in our tests,
while notes were immediately synced with
the iOS version, folders weren’t.
Worst of all, though, was that Allegory
frequently crashed. And when it relaunched,
random new folders had been added to
Dashboard and some changes we’d made must
before the crash were lost.
Allegory has some interesting features,
but it doesn’t translate to the Mac very well
at all. It may be that some of its problems are
related to Catalyst and will be quickly Ľxed,
but for the moment it’s not an app that we
can recommend.
THE BOTTOM LINE. There are many better
options for note–taking on the Mac and
syncing with iOS. KENNY HEMPHILLAllegory’s interface works
well on iPhone and iPad
but not so well on the
Mac, where the notes
stack looks out of place.Allegory’s settings provide users with lots of scope for
customizing the app.
Reviews
42 SEP 2020 maclife.com