Note taking and writing apps

As I mentioned in my post about which stylus I prefer, I wanted to go paperless in meetings with my iPad.  I've had a bit of an unstructured strategy to trying out apps, largely based on reading about one and just trying it. Here's what I've found...

First up I bought SoundNote . I was excited by the prospect of the sync'd audio and written/typed notes.  This is a fantastic feature. I frequently lose the thread of my scribbled notes but with this app you just touch the particular part of your notes and the app plays back the audio from that part of the meeting. Not all good though I'm afraid, the actual writing graphic is horribly angular and scratchy. I don't have the neatest writing but it looks like a 4 year old has written it (after several drinks!). Also the app doesn't have pages per se, just a scrolling sheet which is not particularly convenient to scroll down when writing. The filing isn't very visually pleasing, just a simple list.  It does allow typing though which is good.

My next purchase was Penultimate.  This one I really like. The graphics actually look like my handwriting and it's really nice to take notes with. The app allows you to keep your notes in separate notebooks which you can name/date for easy retrieval. There is an easy and quick way to switch between ink colours and pen thicknesses, page turning is simple and finding your notebooks is pretty straightforward via either rotating covers or a tiled view of the last page opened.  Some improvements would be the ability to type in the notes and my biggest request would be for the capacity to tag notes. I would ideally like to be able to search by these keywords as I reckon after using the app for a long time the filing/retrieving of notebooks will become onerous.

Next up was Note Taker HD.  This app has the tag capability I wanted from Penultimate but suffered from the scratchy geometric kid writing of Soundnote. It does have the capacity to import pdf files (might work to import penultimate notebooks and tag them). Unfortunately I found adding a new page pretty laborious compared to the one touch simplicity of Penultimate. Also found the reviewing of the multiple notebooks filing system visually unappealing.  It does have a nice editing function where you can write at the bottom of the screen using the edge of the iPad to rest your wrist. I find the wrist rest function on all of these apps a bit hit and miss.

Finally I tried something a bit different in WritePad. This is more of a handwritingrecognition app. It's pretty cool actually and the recognition isexcellent. It does have a tendency to change a word after it got it write (I'm guessing based on what comes next) which is a bit annoying as correctingis a pretty inefficient process.  I think this is great for jotting down lists that you have plenty of time to spend over, or the odd short passage where your not in a hurry and you prefer to hand write it out but want to e-mail a typed version.

All in all Penultimate gets my vote, what I produce are legible notes and the pdf export is pretty coolfor storing and archiving. Interested to hear what others think.