Notability – Best Note Taking App without Handwriting!

Notability is a powerful note taker that helps you capture everything. The streamline interface provides the tools you need to type notes, add pictures, draw figures, insert web clips, make audio recordings, organize notes by subjects, backup to cloud services, and share notes with friends and colleagues.

Notability improves your productivity in lectures, meetings and interviews when you need to work fast, and also afterward to organize, review, edit, and share your notes.

**LOGICAL**

Do you wish you could outline on iPad? Notability has you covered. You can quickly create outlines (bullet or numbered) with our easy-to-use interface. Outlines provide visual connections between subjects to help you stay organized.

**VERSATILE**

You can use one font or multiple fonts per note, whichever you prefer. Add media to enrich your notes with the text flowing automatically around it. This saves space, gives you more choices, and looks cleaner when printing and sharing your notes

Do you want to add a web clip or picture? No problem, add pictures and web clips (via the built in browser) to your notes and place them where you want. You can also re-size, crop, annotate, add single or multi-line captions in any font, and write directly on pictures.

Need to draw a diagram? Simply use your finger or stylus to draw diagrams and figures or write short phrases using your choice of color, stroke width, and transparency level.

Ready to review your notes or desire a larger screen? You can easily maximize the workspace by hiding the toolbars, which is especially helpful when iPad is rotated in landscape mode.

Notability provides excellent support for external keyboards for the speed typers out there.

Some bugs I found for developers

1. When trying to insert web clips, google search sometimes can’t type in the search box
2. The characters float a little when trying to write a list with none bold characters

Overall, this app is one of the best non-handwriting note taking app for students, reporters and more!

Category: Productivity

Type: iPad Only 

Price for iPad: $0.99

 

Note Plus – Handwriting, Note Taking, Shape Drawing, and Sound Recording

Notes Plus is a powerful note-taking tool that supports handwriting, typing and audio recording. It offers close-up writing mode for small text, stroke smoothing, vector shape auto-detection, palm handling, complete folder structure, PDF exporting, emailing, Google Docs uploading, and more.

*** IMPORTANT: This app is not for everybody. Before you buy, please visit the developer website to learn more about the app. I don’t want you to make a wrong purchase decision. There are too much information about what the app can do and cannot do that I cannot put them all here. ***

Notes Plus benefits include:

1. CLOSE-UP HANDWRITING

Hand write comfortably with your big finger, your text will show up as fine as with pen and paper. Auto-advance feature let you write even with your eyes closed. Advanced stroke smoothing algorithm makes your writing look as good as ever; the faster you write, the better it looks.

2. PALM HANDLING

Lay your palm comfortably down with Palm Pad. The pad scrolls along with your palm making it natural to write on a touch screen.

3. TYPED TEXT MIXING

Let you insert keyboard text anywhere on the page with many type faces, font sizes, and colors.

4. SHAPE AUTO-DETECT

Let you draw a basic shape (ellipse, rectangle, line, polygon, …) with your finger, auto-detect and insert the perfect vector shape, then let you edit it.

5. VOICE RECORDING

Let you record audio while jotting down the note. Perfect for meetings, classes, or conferences. Recordings are linked with pages to provide easy playback.

6. EASY EDITING

Let you select handwriting text by just circling around it, then erase or re-arrange it. Erasing a writing is as easy as drawing a line over it. No awkward switching between erase tool, selection tool, and draw tool.

7. EASY ORGANIZING

Provide a complete folder structure. Private folders can be password-protected. A folder can have many notebooks; a notebook can have many pages. Pages are listing with thumbnails. Provide ability to move, copy, duplicate and delete notebooks or individual pages.

8. RECOVERING FROM YOUR MISTAKES

Full undo/redo support. Yes, it does have REDO function; touch and hold undo button to reveal the undo/redo action sheet. Also let you recover your deleted notebooks or pages.

9. CUSTOMIZING TO YOUR TASTE

Many options are provided including: stroke color, thickness, transparency; text font, size, color; paper background, etc.

10. (LAST AND MOST IMPORTANT) CLEAN & NATURAL USER INTERFACE

As you can see from the screenshots below, this app stands out for its clean interface. A great effort was put in to hide controls so that it would not cluster the interface. You should be able to start without a tutorial. However, if you need one, there is one QuickStart guide when the app is first loaded.

Cons

1. This application is a full suit of note taking, it feels a little complex to use for ordinary user but once you mastered it…it’s flawless!
2. When NOT in full screen mode at horizontal, the recording audio button is a little off hence I will trigger the “renaming” of note 90% of the time instead of recording audio

Overall, this app is HIGHLY recommended for anyone who take notes daily for either school or work. The developer seems to be pushing out many updates to the app that will make this app more feature rich in the near future!

Visit the Note Plus youtube channel to see all the features!!

Category: Productivity

Type: iPad Only 

Price for iPad: $4.99 

UPAD – Handwriting, Typing, PDF Annotation, Photo Frame!

Equipped with the best handwrite drawing engine in the world, UPAD will surprise you when you start to write on it with a stylus pen or your finger – because it brings a feeling very close to writing on an actual paper!

UPAD promised smoothness and speed, on top of countless differentiated features from other similar apps.

Let us enlighten you with what UPAD can do.

3 in 1. UPAD is the answer !!!

“Note taking + PDF reader & annotating + Photo editing”

<< 3 modes of UPAD >>

 Note PAD

You can begin by choosing one of the many paper style templates.

Select this mode for taking notes in your college classes, documenting

your business meeting with clients, or simple doodling.

 Book PAD

Download your favorite books in PDF form via iTunes file sharing

or just open it through “Open in UPAD”. Now you can add memo,

highlight, and make sketches on your PDF files. Want to add Post it?

No problem! Select any color and size for your Post it memo.

Photo PAD

Redesign your photo file by selecting a photo frame, add a comment

or two, and then add decoration with color pencil tool. UPAD gives

you an ability to archive your memories in your own way.

<< Key Features >>

 Drawing mode

✔ Draw or write fast with your finger or a stylus

✔ Pen & Highlighter: color & width option

✔ 2 type erasers: pen type & stroke eraser

 Typing mode

✔ Simple text adding feature with keyboard

✔ Various font type, size and color option

✔ Background color option

 Palm-rest: No need to worry about your palm interfering with your writing

✏ Magnifying input mode: Write precise note as you want to

✏ Zoom-in & out with 2 fingers

<< Additional features >>

✏ PDF export: Transfer notes to PDF files and send it to your e-mail

✏ VGA out : Connect iPAD to your desktop screen or a projector and show UPAD on the large screen for the presentation.

✏ Folder management feature support

✏ UPAD data backup and restore

Cons

1. There are no shapes recognition like Notes Plus
2. You can’t make your own Customized Memo background using your own photograph however the available selection is very sufficient for normal usage 
3. You cannot record voice to sync with each page like note plus.

Overall, This application is one of the best note taking application other then “Note Plus” with many of the features but making it simple to use plus a whole lot of new features that any students or lecturers will LOVE to use!

Highly recommended for everyone who have iPAD!

Category: Productivity

Type: iPad Only 

Price for iPad: $4.99 

Penultimate – Handwriting Note Taking Application !!

The best-selling handwriting app for iPad for over a year. You’ll get the fast, tactile gratification of writing on paper, with digital power and flexibility. Take notes, keep sketches, or share your next breakthrough idea — in the office, on the go, or home on the sofa.

ESSENTIAL, EASY TO USE, BEAUTIFUL 

Penultimate stands with the core productivity apps on your iPad. Every detail of the user interface has been designed and refined to be simple and intuitive – no complicated or cluttered settings.

UP AND RUNNING

When you first open your new copy of Penultimate, you’ll find a “welcome” notebook that will walk you through all of the major features. You’ll be scribbling and whizzing through your pages and notebooks in no time.

AMAZING INK AND PAPER

Your handwriting and drawing looks spectacular in bold gel ink. Our writing technology is second to none. Use colors or stick with classic inky black. Three different photorealistic paper styles are included, along with a magically effective eraser tool that’s always the right size. Want a special paper style? Import any image to create and share your own attractive template, or visit The Paper Shop in the app to see the latest convenient collections available for download.

KEEP IT TOGETHER 

Store your thoughts in separate, named notebooks for each topic, project, or category. Penultimate can manage as many notebooks as you can create, each with an infinite number of pages. View your list in a classic notebook carousel — or sort and scroll in a fast grid view. You can browse quickly through all pages, or insert, delete, duplicate, and reorder them.

SERIOUS SOFTWARE

Beneath its graceful exterior Penultimate is a powerful application. Our superior inking technology produces pen strokes that you might think look better-than-real. The pioneering automatic Wrist Protection mode prevents many stray marks from appearing on a page. Penultimate knows the importance of data integrity; you can use a single button to export all of your notebook files to iTunes for backup.

PENULTIMATE MEANS BUSINESS

Send single page images or full notebooks in PDF format to anyone. Collaborate with your colleagues by exporting and importing Penultimate Notebook and Paper files directly via email or iTunes File Sharing. Whether you’re in a conference room or classroom, you can use the iPad VGA Adapter to share your notes on a screen or projector, as your audience follows along with your work in real time. Print directly from your iPad with ePrint-compatible printers.

Cons

1. The eraser don’t have custom thickness hence must be very careful when trying to erase small texts or drawings
2. There’s no layering, if there’s a layering you can erase a layer without affecting other “perfected” writings or drawings like in photoshop
3. Wrist protection sometimes erase what you are writing instead of your wrist
4. Cannot import photograph into the note book like a scrap book
5. Cannot make a text box for simple text typing for captions but it’s ok…this is for note taking
6. Why not add audio recording too, many lectures goes so fast you can’t keep up…audio recording will be COOL
7. No URL linking? Haha

There are many note taking applications in the AppStore and this probably will be the first of many to come, this app so far have the smoothest handwriting ink but lacks some features that other note taking apps have.

Personally, I like this application however sometimes I type faster then I write hence this can probably good for students who can’t afford a small bluetooth keyboard that can be synced to the iPad via bluetooth naturally.

Anyway, this is a dream come true for many to use a paperless notepad for your business & education use! Highly recommended!

Category: Productivity

Type: iPad Only 

Price for iPad: $1.99