App review: Note taking (hand)

The Need

In an earlier post I said apps are like knives and that you should think about the balance between specialty function (say a fish boning knife) versus the sort of general utility offered by a Swiss army knife.

And as I come to my first category of review, note taking, I realize that I have been struggling with just this question. I find myself with two distinct needs when I take notes, and so I have two subcategories, handwritten versus typed. This first review is for the handwritten kind.

Prior to the iPad (and really, up until a few weeks ago), my office habits would have me grab a legal pad and take it to meetings. I have beautiful leather binders and portfolios. I have specialty paper from Levenger. The problem arises in that I have all of this paper scattered. I'll just grab whatever pad or portfolio happens to be closest. I am not good at filing paper. And most of these notes aren't really worth the trouble of filing.

Typing on the iPad isn't so great for meetings. Plus, I always like to draw diagrams. Handwriting apps come to the rescue.

Key Features

• The app should load quickly and be ready to accept notes within seconds


• The app should have an easy and obvious interface. There can be a lot of powerful features, and that's fine, but the basics of writing and drawing need to be very simple


• There has to be app stability, of course


• And it has to offer rich backup and syncing utilities such as dropbox, email, iTunes document sharing


• I want my handwriting app to favor handwriting, but to allow typing


• I need to be able to organize notes into books, and I need to be able to store thousands of them


• I want to be able to send my notes as image or PDF files


• And I want to be able to input PDF's and mark those up.


• I don't expect a quality app for free, but less than $10 would be nice


• Undo, redo to multiple levels


• Smooth writing with or without a stylus


• Ability to zoom so my writing can be reasonably compact on the page

The Contenders

 UYH (Use Your Handwriting)

Penultimate


(now that Penultimate integrates with Evernote, I may need to take another look at it)

Note Taker HD

UPAD

 

 

 

 

And the winner is...

UPad, "hands down". Note Taker HD is more popular among the student crowd. Note Taker HD has a lot of extra functionality, such as drag and drop shapes. But I need to pick one diet and stick to it, and for me it's UPad. UPad does a wonderful job of:

so here's an app that does exactly what I need it to do and no more. It will truly replace all my little legal pads and other paper. UPad doesn't come with much in the way of help files or videos, but that's fine - it's quite intuitive. And the ability to zoom in and write neatly on forms could be quite useful to my salesforce at work.