Evernote has been rapidly expanding their various partnerships and the ways in which it integrates with various iPhone apps to create a seamless system for capturing, and later accessing, all kinds of information. One of those apps, Egretlist, ($2.99)  is a bit different. It is the first app that was actually designed from the ground up to be integrated with Evernote. In fact, that is how the app got its name. How so? Well Evernote’s symbol is the elephant head and the Egret is a bird that rides on top of an elephant’s head. In the same way, this app adds a layer that rides on top of Evernote to turn it into a simple but powerful task manager.

Egretlist capitalizes on Evernote’s check-box feature to aggregate and organize tasks within Evernote. (Evernote Tip: You can insert a checkbox into a note by pressing Shift+CMD+T (Mac) or CTRL+Shift+C (Windows).) That means you can easily pull up to-dos and projects and all of the related information that goes with them that you have previously stored in Evernote.

Over on the Evernote blog there is a Q/A with the app’s creator, Juan Arzola of MindsMomentum. When asked- “As an Evernote user, what inspired you to create this application?” he replied,

As a developer, my everyday work is task-driven. It’s full of programming and coding for various projects. I use Evernote to organize and track all the details for these projects. I also work with a lot of images and documents, and I like that in Evernote, a given task notes can include not only what needs to be done, but also the data and content that supports the task. Evernote’s great for me because it lets me take freestyle notes, yet easily organize them in really finite and specific ways.

In creating Egretlist, I took advantage of Evernote’s checkbox/task functionality and wanted to find a way to make better use of it. I wanted to create an application that uses organization functionality already built into Evernote, without creating a completely different app just for the sake of making it more task-oriented—all of my data is already stored and organized in Evernote. Egretlist, instead, extends the existing functionality to give additional support to people who use Evernote for tasks.

When asked, “What are you hoping users get out of this?” he replied,

Many people use Evernote to organize their tasks, but they don’t have a system that sorts them so directly. Task managers are great, but they’re usually only accessible from one platform, or if they are on multiple platforms, you still have to open the application to input data. Evernote reaches across platforms and has many ways to send data and content into a notebook and organize it. This makes checkboxed notes much more dynamic and is a really complete way to manage tasks.

It is an interesting concept and one I am trying to integrate into my workflow although I must admit that, at least right now, I find the interface to be pretty but a bit overwhelming. Still, if you have ever wanted to use Evernote as a task manager this might be the solution for you.

Best of all… We have two copies to give away. To enter to win one of them just tell us how you might use the app in your life.