Corvus Consulting

Meetings of any size suffer the moment a laptop comes out; the open screen creates no end of distractions pulling participant attention between shared and private contexts. For that reason alone, I’m a paper notebook guy at meetings. But the iPad seems a way to have the benefits of a digital device without the weird social barrier that laptops create, so I’ve been on the hunt for a note-taking app that could replace the Moleskin.

It’s like like panning for gold: lots of junk with only a couple nuggets that are, well, noteworthy. SimpleNote, which I fell in love with on the iPhone, dominates my text-only note-taking with its superb synching between iPhone, iPad and desktop (using JustNotes as the front-end). But for creative work I need something beyond plain text and with features that get into the iPad’s tablet groove.

After the jump you’ll find short and merciless reviews of seven apps, with the best ones saved for the end.

Ghostwriter Notes

$1.99. Rating: 1/5 [iTunes]

Ghostwriter is pretty awful, with one redeeming touch being the spatial approach to collecting separate notebooks on a home screen. After that, you’re sold an app with the word ‘writer’ in its name that only offers freehand drawing. The screenshots show some kind of trackpad feature where a writing space is magnified, something that I wish OmniGraffle had, but I couldn’t figure out how to activate it.

Inside a notebook it’s easy to get lost in the page navigation, and moving between pages is accompanied by a page-turn animation that’s slow and choppy. Ghostwriter breaks even the simplest of icon conventions, using the ‘write a new item’ icon for document sharing. Worst of all, the app doesn’t bother to auto-save your work, which misses something essential about what the iPad experience is supposed to provide.

Smart Notes

Currently unavailable due to update problems. Rating: 2/5 (for having some potential)

The Smart Notes demo screencasts I saw before its release made the app look like everything I could ask for. Actual use of the low-priced app told a very different story, one of an app stuffed with features but poorly thought out on the basics. Want to move something? Nope. How about undo? Nope. Auto-save? Nope.

Despite that, Smart Note is stuffed fuller than a Christmas turkey. There are a lot of ‘things’ you can drop onto a page, but without the basics covered, those features don’t bring the value they otherwise could. I think Smart Note can recover itself, but the developer needs to learn the folly of stuffing in a bunch of features because they sound cool while ignoring the basics. In other words, apps need to be about doing a few things well before doing a lot of anything.

Synotes Slate

$1.99. Rating: 0/5 [iTunes]

The epitome of an app trying to cash in on early arrival in the app store, but with little more than a shell to show for it. The feature set is impoverished, the interaction clumsy, and requires an account with the vendor where your notes will be synced even if you don’t want them to be. Of course, that account requirement isn’t advertised in the app description, making for a cute data grab.

A Notepad HD

$3.99 (on sale for .99 as of this writing). Rating: 3/5 [iTunes]

Things get a little better with A Notepad, despite buying into the atrocious HD naming meme that infects early iPad app names. It’s not much more than a decently-themed typing app with the ability to share notes via wifi. The strangest feature of the app has to be the startup screen, which gives instructions on how to use the app *every* time you start it up, rather than dropping you into the last-used note or at least an index. Again, we find no auto-save.

A Notepad does something very right: it doesn’t over-promise, and it doesn’t over-reach. The text-only aspect doesn’t work for me and the theme is heavier on black than I like, but I can see it working for some people.

PenUltimate

$2.99. Rating: 3/5 [iTunes]

PenUltimate is a something of a hipster app, having charmed the blogosphere with its stylish good looks. It doesn’t do much more than Ghostwriter, but it better and with a premium on aesthetics. My bad handwriting on the fixed-size pages limits the utility of the app, but if I could type in addition to drawing, this app could well win my note-taking heart.

Sketch Notes

$2.99. Rating: 3.5/5 [iTunes]

Handling both freehand drawing and typing, Sketch Notes comes close to what I’m looking for in a note-taking app. There’s a lot to like, especially with the well-laid out tool palettes and the ability to move sketches around after the fact. I expected to move blocks of text with the same ease, but this is only possible with cut and paste.

While I find a lot to like in Sketch Notes, I couldn’t escape the feeling that something is missing. It may be the lined paper format, or the feeling that drawing/writing mode toggles were placed too far away from the hand. Those quibbles aside, this app could, within one or two minor updates, become a real hit.

Mental Note for iPad

$2.99. Rating: 4/5 [iTunes]

Mental Note is among the best of the note-taking apps I’ve looked at so far, and has a solid place on my home screen as one of the apps I use the most. The feature set allows for freehand drawing, typing, and audio recording in-line. Audio is handled especially well, with recordings appearing in-line with text and drawings.

Mental Note isn’t perfect, though. It could use a more professional look as an alternate to the overplayed ‘sketchy’ aesthetic (a problem shared by Sketch Notes), tool selection is pretty awful, requiring one to select through pen sizes and colours rather than choosing from popover palettes. PDF output is somewhat poor around page breaks, and the app could be smarter about using natural spacing in a note page to guess at where to put page breaks in the PDF export.

For my needs, Mental Note is the best app I’ve found so far, and I’m looking forward to seeing it improve over time.