Hey folks,

I know there are many threads about styluses already, but there are so many that I don't have a clue which one is the best... I need my iPad for studying information systems at an university in the coming term.
In case you don't know information systems, it's basically a combination of business studies and IT.

It would really help if you could give me some advices... I need the best stylus for writing. Drawing/sketching,etc. aren't important to me, it just needs to write perfectly.
In addition I could use some advice on good apps for studying. For now I got Pages, Numbers and Keynote and iStudiezPro. I still need a good program for making notes and a program which is able to annotate .pdf and .ppt/.pptx.

regards
Viper

My sister got me one for Christmas and it doesn't work at all.

Viper,

Unfortunately, no stylus is going to give you flawless performance with taking handwritten notes on the iPad. It's just the nature of the beast on a capacitive touch screen. I use the Targus stylus myself. It performs well and feels good in my hand (except it is a little short). It was also pretty cheap on Amazon.

The App that you use for handwritten notes also makes a difference in performance. Some apps feature palm rejection so you can rest your hand on the screen while you write, while others do not. I have a couple notetaking apps on my iPad and I like Penultimate the best for performance. It has a barebones feature set (a few options for different paper types, colors, and pen width), but it also features great palm rejection and the features it does have work well. I also have mental note, which allows you to import diagrams and other items to mark up, but does not have palm rejection. Goodreader is awesome for marking up documents and works with many different file types. It is one of the most useful iPad productivity apps.

My suggestion would be to type your notes into a notetaking app or use pen and paper. During meetings and classes, I've never been able to keep up taking handwritten notes on my iPad. It's not really made for that, IMO, and it shows when you try to force that usage scenario on it.

push

Two good options are NotetakerHD and Notes plus, both of which have videos on youtube so you should get a rough idea of how they work. Notes+ will also take audio notes at the same time.

I would also recommend evernote (free) which is awesome for managing large volumes of notes, tagging etc., but best of all it syncs over the web so even if you lose everything your notes are safe. You can log on and access them from anywhere.

You might also want to take a look at some mindmapping software. Theres quite a long thread here on the forums. Personally I use MindNode as it syncs with my mac. GL.

I'm in the same boat. I gotta tell you though - to a certain extent, it is going to be trial and error. Luckily the note taking apps are pretty inexpensive, so, you can try a half dozen, and will only cost you $20...

Also, even though you don't want to wade, that is the only way you are going to get impressions on a wide variety of opinions, uses, etc. There are a number of threads here on iPad Forum that talk about the very things. If you look for a short answer - be happy with the response.

Sounds like you want to know the pro's cons, etc.. you just have to go through the threads, and read people's opinons - then you will probably still get half a dozen apps to try them out.

There are some reasonable free ones - neu.annotate, and neu - note taker, or something - both same developer.

Penultimate and Good reader are brainless - $0.99 apiece... Evernote - Free, also brainless.

After that, you start having to look harder - they all do somethings well, and other things not so much. As I look more and more at this same stuff - I am defintely going to show up first day with a pad of note paper and a pen, as well as my iPad... Just in case...

I got NoteTaker HD and Penultimate now... I love the edit modes and wrist guard in NoteTaker HD, but it sucks that it doesnt have notebooks like Penultimate does... Penultimates wrist guards sucks, as my wrist is still leaving marks on the screen, but it has this awesome notebooks. So yeah a combination of both would be the best xD

As mindmapping software I got iThoughtsHD now, which is pretty awesome. iStudiez Pro is also a must have, as I got my timetable and all my teachers etc in it and I also got the holidays and projects, exams, etc. in it.

for .pdf and .ppt annotation I use iAnnotate now.

And the Navigon software is really great if you dont have a navigator in your car already ;-)

Note Taker HD also has some nice editing of PDF files, like being able to delete a page of a PDF, and it looks like you can also combine different PDFs together. IAnnotate will let you annotate, but if you want to get rid of a page, I couldn't find a way to do it.

I'll check out iThoughts and IStudiez Might be something I could use.