Shift worker's calendar Lite for iOS

There are quite a few calendar apps in the iOS app store, many of them offering pared-down, intuitive interfaces that interact with Facebook and other online services. Shift Worker's Calendar is designed to serve a specific niche of individuals and managers in industries with shift workers. Integrating tools for recording overtime, shift schedules and total compensation, it has as lot of promise, but ultimately falls flat due to clunky, at times frustrating design choices, unnecessary tools and a lack of resources to guide in setup.

It's not immediately clear who this app is for, whether it would be better suited for an employee tracking her shifts or a manager tracking who is being scheduled on which days. You can create a new "Shift Work Type" and assign a color code to it. You can also assign an overtime pay value for that specific shift work type and then assign it to individual days. This alone is a very complicated process, however, requiring multiple menus that are not clearly labeled, and when shifts are added to the calendar, they are even harder to remove or edit. Adding events is thankfully simple enough, but because the shift work functions are poorly labeled, hard to implement, and harder still to edit, there is no clear reason why anyone would need this app instead of the built-in calendar provided by Apple.

If you are interested in a work-shift tracking tool for your iPhone or iPad, we recommend using the current Calendar tool built into iOS and creating a custom calendar. The interface, editing tools, and display of Shift Worker's Calendar offer no good reasons to shift from one to the other.