Ive been trying to take notes on an iPad mini during meetings. So far, it has been an underwhelming experience. TL;DR: I want the collaboration features from quip, the autoscrolling feature from penultimate, the lines and responsiveness from notability, and a capacitive pen with no battery and a fine tip. First, writing implements are a challenge for handwriting apps — My finger was insufficiently precise and if you think about how writing works the beauty is that pens provide leverage that allows the magnification of small, fast movements. — I got the Jot Script pen that Evernote sells but that requires that you turn it on to work well which is really frustrating when you want to just write quickly. I liked that it had a fine tip but even when it is on the screen isn’t very reactive to it. It is also a bit bulky and doesn’t have a clip which makes it hard to keep with the iPad. — I have a capacitive stylus (amPen) which is responsive and convenient but doesn’t have a very fine tip so it is hard to write precisely. The bigger issue is the software — Paper by 53 has beautiful pens but it is a drawing app and not really designed for writing notes. — Notability has easily the best in terms of line definition and responsiveness and I really like the way they have handled zoom with two panes. It is quite full featured and has almost everything I would want. Unfortunately, to write legibly you really need to use the zoom and it has an awful system for advancing the zoom position that makes it really hard to write fluidly — Penultimate has very few features but it does have the one that is most important: once I zoom and start writing it cleverly autoscrolls so I can just keep my hand in place and write to the end of the line where there is a carriage return. It is also nice that it syncs with evernote though I wish there were more of the evernote features in the core app. -- Also: all the apps sometimes have lag between writing and the line showing up which is just a disaster. I also tried apps where you just type instead of writing (quip on the iPad is awful, btw) but for meetings I find that distracts people much more and also requires more of my focus. Has anyone got a better solution?
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 06:58:33 +0000
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