Evernote by Bernard Goldbach licensed under Creative Commons https://flic.kr/p/85ka5T
I’ve been thinking about what sort of apps I’m going to need for this Digital Challenge, and it quickly became apparent that there are a LOT of note-taking apps on the market. So I’ve been slowly filtering them down to what I think will be best suited to my needs.
Other than needing to take handwritten notes and play with PDFs I don’t really have any other requirements. I’ve never done this before so I’m still not sure what tools will actually be of any use to me. For example I’ve noticed a number of apps boasting about being perfect for artists and providing all the tools an artist would ever need to create a masterpiece. I’m not an artist. I struggled through GSCE Art a long time ago so I know I certainly won’t be creating any masterpieces anytime soon! But then again these drawing apps have the software to work seamlessly with a stylus, perfect for handwriting.
In the end I’ve narrowed it down to the following four: Notes Plus, Noteshelf, Notability and Goodnotes.
All of these apps offer pretty similar but powerful tool-sets. As well as this they all claim to be the best app for handwritten notes so that’s a good start! Looking at my short-list I don’t believe any of them will be a bad choice so it may just come down to which stylus I end up getting as they seem to support specific styluses.
I had considered using Microsoft’s OneNote, but it isn’t very well optimised for handwritten notes and it doesn’t play particularly well with Evernote, which I’m already well acquainted with. Speaking of Evernote, I realised that they actually have their own sister app called Penultimate designed especially for handwritten notes, which is completely free! Although it’s a little light on features I may as well try it!
I will also be using Google Drive extensively, as this seems to be the best way to access files on all the apps. Google Drive will act primarily as a storage and back-up facility, while Evernote will manage all of the organisation and filing.
Now I just need to find a stylus…
Hi Eugene,
I’m curious about your experiences with OneNote. I take it that you are actually referring to OneNote for the iPad, am I right? What would you improve about the handwriting experience on OneNote for iPad? And in your opinion, how should it be interacting with Evernote?
Most grateful for your insights.
Marjolein Hoekstra
Hi Marjolein,
Yes, I’m referring to OneNote for iPad. I suppose the main issue I had with the OneNote handwriting experience was that it didn’t have the tools to make the experience enjoyable. There aren’t very many features for handwriting present in OneNote that were so commonplace in the other apps I tested. For example the other apps all featured a zoom box to write within that allows you to view the page you’re working on in the top of the screen, while you write in the box on the bottom of the screen, having it appear in a much smaller font at the top of the screen to review. This means that you can fit more words to a line, and also the dimensions of the screen more closely reflect the dimensions of a traditional A4 page. This is important to me as I read all of my notes straight from the iPad, so it helps my studies to maintain the physical notebook experience.
I feel that OneNote works incredibly well when taking short notes and making to-do lists. But as I take pages of notes at a time during lectures, OneNote just couldn’t compare to the other apps I mentioned.
As for OneNote interacting with Evernote, I actually don’t believe that it should try to. I don’t believe that Evernote is leaps and bounds better than OneNote, I just happen to have started using it first. However in saying that, it would be useful if there was a way to export your entire OneNote experience to Evernote, converting all the OneNote notebooks including sections and pages to the Evernote format.
Thanks for the comment!
Eugene
Hi Eugene,
Thank you very much for your detailed answer. I’ve just shared your response from my Twitter account @OneNoteC, with a CC to two people from the Microsoft #OneNote Teams: Ian Mikutel (Digital Inking) and Ryan McMinn (Mac OS X and iOS clients). I hope they will respond here too.
All the best with your project and your studies. Thank you again,
Marjolein Hoekstra
[…] is going to go paperless this year and he is using a combination of note taking with a stylus and apps to collate information together in one place. It will be interesting in how this works out, and whether we will eventually […]