Findings - An Agenda Clone

Had anyone seen the app that’s being currently featured by Apple called Findings? Looks as if they nearly copied Agenda in its look and feel and features. Free iOS app with their desktop purchase.

Very suspiciously similar.

Apparently they are related; i.e. the developers collaborate with each other:
Findings

I stumbled across it because of another app they have called “Studies” that actually times and tracks how much time you spend studying notes. (I was studying to take a professional exam.)

While the interface looks similar, but there seem to be significant functional differences, mainly the lack of calendar integration, but also things like tags and syncing (not iCloud?). Although it does seem to have more ways to organize data, like “status” (needs review, complete) and attachments - those could both be helpful, but I would not trade the calendar integration for anything.

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I’ve never heard of such a thing - two competing companies in a very competitive space (notebook apps) share code and making very similar apps. How strange. I’d love to hear the back story and why they are doing this.

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And how is that in your mutual interest to share codes and ideas on somewhat overlapping/competing products?

I can’t speak in their behalf, but it could be that by being friends, they could spend time branching out and become more secure financially by taking key features and creating niche products. I would never download the findings app, since I don’t conduct any experiments, but I would find the Agenda app more useful since it’s genrally applicable and I forget things.

Findings is developed by Charles Parnot, who is a close friend of our development team. We do share a few pieces of source code, but nothing that is fundamental to either app.

Findings is quite a different app to Agenda, and has a completely different target audience. It is a lab notebook for scientists. Both apps deal in text, but really that is about the extent of the similarity.

Hope that clarifies it.

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Maybe “status” is something that could usefully be added to Agenda at some time in the future? For the moment I’m using tags to label GTD-type stuff like status, locations (for grouped tasks), energy required, etc, which is so far working fine

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