Review: MyWeek
Score:
74%
If it's all about getting to your information quickly, then diary hounds will want to check out MyWeek, a lock screen application that will give you an overview of your appointments for the next week.
Version Reviewed: 1.5.0.0
Buy Link | Download / Information Link
There's not much to the application - open it up and you'll have a single screen of settings and a save button at the bottom. And that's all you need, because the rest of the functionality is tucked away from the user. Once you set MyWeek to be your lock screen in the settings, it will do the overlaying, the image mashing, and whatever else is demanded by the Windows Phone 8 OS.
What the settings screen will let you do is refine what you will see on your lock screen. From the number of days to show (or if you want to lock it down to a fixed view with a Monday always on the left of the layout), to the timeframe that should be displayed on screen, MyWeek offers you a good spread of customisation options.
You can also change the 'theme' of the week view, to choose the best colours that work for your eyes. Only four themes are available to choose from when you open the app, but you can add your own theme colours so that the look of the week view is customised to your own liking. It's also a nice touch that you can set up 'the current theme colour' as one of the choices, which will of course be reactive to any changes made for the overall theme on your handset.
Below the theme picker, you can switch off or on the calendars available on your handset to decide what will or will not be shown on the lock screen.
The final area of customisation is the image that is used behind the week view - the traditional lock screen image. MyWeek bundles forty backgrounds, but you can add your own images, with the regular Windows Phone media picker in action once more.
Using MyWeek is easy - just turn your handset on, and the top half of your lock screen will present you with the overview of your selected days - all day appointments at the top, and then your other appointments showing in a blacked out time line for each day. The time and date display, as well as your quick status views, remain intact.
And that's it. The app delivers the function it promises, quickly and easily. But... there are some tweaks I would like to see in MyWeek, and there's a major one that makes me hesitant to switch over and use it.
While you can select from the forty built in wallpapers, and you can add your own from your photo gallery, what you can't do is have another Lock Screen app provide the 'image' layer that MyWeek etches the week view on top of. And I do love my Bing images.
If MyWeek could sit on top of the Bing Image of the Day, then I would be confident I would be using this application on a regular basis, especially if I was at a conference or attending an event with lots of times and dates to keep an eye on.
Right now, MyWeek is obviously a nice tool but the personal connection I have (I know, to an ever changing lock screen image) limits its usefulness to me. Your mileage will probably vary, and if you have a fixed image for your lock screen then MyWeek should integrate quite nicely into your life.
MyWeek is a £1.29/$1.49 download from the Windows Store. A free trial is available, and you can start to download it from the AAWP App Directory.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at