iPad App Review: Note taking (typed)

I saw another blogger review note taking apps, and I liked his approach. He used each app for a few hours at a time, taking notes at a conference and seeing how well the app supported him. He had different needs than I do, so he came up with different answers.

Earlier I reviewed handwriting apps and have picked Upad for my personal use. But when I want better notes, searchable notes, and notes that I might want to clean-up into “real” documents, I have a new need, one for typed text support.

And so I am using my application of choice (at least until the experiment is over!) to write this article. Let’s see how much I can do, how well I can format, and how easily I can transfer it to my website.

First things first – I am using an apple keyboard. I play the classical guitar, so my right fingernails are long and polished and very important to me. My left fingernails look like wolverines have gnawed them down. And my left fingertips are calloused. So while typing on the iPad’s on-screen keyboard is possible, it’s really rather difficult for me.

I just tried a case with an integrated bluetooth keyboard. GREAT idea, lousy implementation. The space bar on this model is so deeply recessed you cannot hit it with your thumb. I’ll write a review on accessories shortly.

So for now, it’s either take a keyboard with me to meetings or deal with the on-screen keyboard. For the latter, I won’t be typing very lengthy notes.

OK, so what am I looking for in a Note Taking app?

• it needs to quickly load and allow me to start typing notes within seconds


• I need some formatting options, but the app should really be minimilist to let me pound text in. I'll use Word or Pages if I want to create a pretty document


• searching and organizing are key. I want to be able to have notes in notebooks and notebooks be able to be nested. I want to be able to tag items.


• The app should favor text input, but allow for drawing and handwriting


• The app should be able to import a variety of file types, and export to plain text, RTF, PDF, and files stored should adhere to some relatively open standard (plain text, HTML, OPML, Markdown).


• Syncing and backing up (to dropbox, ideally) are critically important.


• Cut and paste graphics would be nice to have

There are a lot of these applications on the market, and more coming on-line every day. So in my “pick one diet” vein, I tried a bunch of these for a little bit of time, before deciding on a winner. In the next week or so I will confirm my selection and start using this app exclusively.

My initial test was trying to get ready for a trip to Italy and organizing an itinerary. I then took notes during the trip. So I was initially looking at apps that were primarily outliners. And I really like doing brainstorming and document prep in outline mode. But in the end, I found that I was spending too much time futzing around with outline levels and formatting.

The Contenders

Daily Notes + To Do 

This has been my most often used iPad app. I do not use the to do features, and they thoughtfully allow you to turn that off. It's a great journaling program. You can have as many tabs as you want, as many pages per tab. Each page is tied to a date, so it is not ideal for organizing your notes in other ways (although it does allow tagging). It has dropbox "backup" (so you have to remember to press that button from time to time) and very limited formatting. It is what I ended up using for my travel itinerary and diary, and I think that I will keep this program for that use. But for going to a meeting or a conference or some other event that you just want to take notes with, it's lacking. And no export to PDF, so what you have is limited to iPad production and consumption.

OmniOutliner

Ludicrously expensive for what it does. Good outlining, but I could not easily create this post using Omni. No Dropbox sync. Worst of all, occasionally get an "omnibase" error.

carbonfin outliner

If outlining is what you want, this is a better and far less expensive version than Omni

Notability

I want to like this app. There is inherently nothing wrong with it. It's main distinguishing feature is the ability to record audio and have that synched to where you've typed notes. So for a student, that could be great. Although as a student, I found recording to be a crutch that made note taking worse. I've used Notability for recording guitar lessons and making notes, but in the end I pretty much stopped using it. They just released a new version that gives you multiple fonts per "note". I suppose it's the note aspect that bothers me the most. You can type a very long note, and the note can be part of a category, but it just seems more geared to index card kind of note taking, rather than free-flowing. Good dropbox, webDav and other support though.

Awesome Note

Even worse with the notecard metaphor. One of those apps that does "everything but nothing well." Great sync to google docs and evernote, though, so as an iPad post-it pad, it does indeed seem awesome. But then again, evernote has its own app which is just fine for that purpose.

Thinkbook

This is a very interesting design and does a tremendous job of outlining. The developer has come up with a "slider" that you can toss lines and paragraphs and other content into and out of and can move sections quickly. While I love being able to expand and collapse sections, it seems impossible to get Thinkbook out of outline view and just display all text expanded.

But the clear winner is:

Notebooks

I wish I could give you a more detailed name. App developers need to learn something about branding. Even their help files and website just call it "Notebooks".

Anyway, that aside, Notebooks is exactly what I was looking for. I have typed this review in it and will shortly go back to add formatting and pictures, then export to HTML and email it for posting on my blog (or maybe do that all through the pasteboard).

Notebooks allows you to create nested notebooks. Within a notebook, you can have another notebook, a note, an image, or an imported document. You can make notes tasks.

Notes in Notebooks are typed on a lined sheet and as far as you're concerned, you're just typing on a very long sheet that keeps scrolling. The files are saved continuously, so as you bounce around within the program or out to other apps, the last thing you typed is always there.

There are so many features that this app comes with a downloadable 40 page user manual. But at the same time, you can start using it immediately.

So to give you an idea of how I use this app, I have a set of notebooks. One book is "data center" and when I have weekly emails with leasing reports, I open those in Notebooks and they automatically become a read-only note. So far, no problem with Excel, Word, or PDFs. The only thing I wish I could do is annotate these files (either with handwriting or typing on say a new layer). For all I know it has that capability and I just haven't figured it out yet. And even now, I can "open with..." quickdocs and edit (although due to the architecture of iPad those changes don't get saved back to notebook).

Files are saved as text and while there is not a PC or Mac version yet (although it sounds like they might be planning one), there are other options. For me, should I need to clean up and format a notebook, I'd just send it to Word as an HTML document.

Searching is very powerful in this app, and that's a critical function. I can now see that I will use this exclusively for typed notes for all sorts of things and for many years. So the amount of notes I will have will number in the thousands.

Notebooks anticipates this with tools to combine notes, notebooks and to zip everything up as well.