Well with class starting on Monday, it was time to make a decision and get some practice in so I can take notes.
For me, it came down to Notes Plus and Note Taker HD. I finally bought Notes Plus yesterday and I have to say I absolutely love it. The lack of typing ability is what gave Note Taker HD the final blow.
With Notes Plus, I can hand-write or type anywhere on the paper at any time. I also like the deletion gesture. If you're writing and you make a mistake, just swipe back and forth across what you want to delete and it's gone. Awesome! With pen and paper, I always had to scribble it out.
I also like the ability to select anything that has been written and move it around. Sometimes I'd be taking notes during class and the instructor would go on a slight tangent, then go back to the original topic... but then I had no extra lines to add more notes! Now I can select a line (or however much I want) and simply move it (or you also have the option to delete a selection). It's so awesome.
The auto-shape detection is no good for me, because my diagrams usually require smaller shapes... the shapes have to be rather large for them to be auto-detected. It's a cool feature, for sure, but I just don't see it being used much by me. However, I absolutely love the fact that I can draw anywhere on the page, as well as mix writing and typing, so that's still a major plus.
Also, you have a quick toolbar that uses the most recent pens you've created. I created a fine blue pen for writing (looks just like the gel pens I love), and a think semitransparent pink one that functions as a highlighter. Very cool.
Another bit of icing on the cake is the audio recording. You can record a lecture in your notebook! I played around with it a bit and found that if you stop the recording, and then start a new one (on the same page), it basically just adds another track. Good for breaks and stuff.
But the absolute best feature, by far, is the zoom-writing mode (or whatever it's called). Similar to Note Taker HD, you have a zoomed in box that you write in, which writes smaller text on the areas where the box is located on the paper. It's kind of hard to explain without seeing it in action. But it auto-scrolls to the right in a very intuitive way, and you can also perform a carriage return function via a quick button. It sounds weird, but it's really amazing and very easy to use.
At any time, you have a variety of options to export a whole notebook or individual pages as .pdf document (including all markups) via e-mail or GoogleDocs.
For simply taking notes (handwritten or typed), Notes Plus is incredible. I give it 4/5 stars.
To get that last 5/5 star, I feel like it could use these features:
- import files (.pdf, .doc, .ppt) and be able to insert them as pages in an existing note, to allow for annotations
- be able to delete an audio recording from a page
- export an audio recording as .mp3
- allow shape auto-detection to accept smaller shapes
If it had those features, it would be absolutely perfect. I believe the developer is actually working on some of those, so I look forward to a future update.
Overall, well worth the money for any college student (or anyone needing to write notes). I may even bring my iPad to work now and use it to take notes during meetings.
