If you are in a profession where you meet with multiple clients throughout the day, good appointment management may be your biggest concern. iSession is an iPhone app developed by Spud Pickles to help users manage their busy appointment book. Targeted towards professionals like psychologists, estheticians, and physical therapists, iSession aims to provide users with an easy way to schedule new appointments or recurring visits.

What is it and what does it do

Main Functionality

iSession provides multiple views of your schedule, including year, week, and hour. Users can easily set up recurring appointments, and can add notes to each appointment as a reminder of what the client needs to discuss. Additionally, iSession can pull client information directly from your Contacts.

Pros

• Free, takes up very little space, and is compatible for users still running iOS 3.0
• Tracks payments
• Pulls client info from Contacts seamlessly

Cons

• Hasn’t been updated since 2011
• Most recent update removed Google Sync functionality, doesn’t appear to have iCal or desktop sync functionality yet
• No ability to passcode lock the app to protect confidential information
• Innovative “dot” system to see where you have a free appointment block isn’t really all that helpful

Discussion

My biggest problem with iSession has to do with the fact that the developed explicitly state that “iSession is ideally suited to professionals that schedule sessions with clients. This application is most beneficial to counselors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and mental health therapists.”

Other professions, such as tutor or massage therapist, are listed as well. But my beef with the app is that there is no way to lock or passcode iSessions. True, you can lock your phone instead, but I would think that most medical professionals who need to keep client info confidential would shy away from using an app that lists client information without being passcode-locked, even if they already lock their phones. At the very least, a panic gesture response would be nice.

However, other than that baffling missed step, the core functionality of iSession is solid. Scheduling a new appointment takes only seconds: pick a date and time, tap on a client’s name in your Contacts, and add any relevant notes to the appointment. The overall look of iSessions is very much in keeping with Apple’s native app designs, which is nice.

Previous versions of iSessions had a whole slew of nasty crash bugs related to the scheduling process: thankfully, these were addressed several updates ago, and the app did not crash once during testing.

Conclusion and download link

While I still can’t believe that there’s no passcode and that Google Sync got removed, iSession is still a fairly solid app. If you have confidentiality clauses with your clients, just make certain that your phone is locked to preserve their contact info from prying eyes. I do wish the “dot” system to indicate where there are free blocks on the schedule was replaced with a color bar divided into blocks for morning, afternoon, and evening: I think that would be more useful at a glance for users trying to figure out when they have some free blocks of time than the current dot system.

Price: Free

Version reviewed: 1.5.0

Requires iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, iOS version 3.0 or later

Download size: 1.6 MB

iSession on Apple App Store