So, remember last week how I wrote about iPad apps for work? No, well go back and read it, I’ll wait. Back? Excellent, it was a good article wasn’t it? Anyway, this week let’s tackle the task of eliminating that yellow notepad you carry with you to all those meetings. You know the one, it has those doodles and scribbles and scratches all over it, oh, and the occasional note that you write down during those meetings.
Let’s start with the universal note taking app that is available on not only the iPad, but the iPhone, Android, desktops, in fact, just about anywhere you live electronically. That would be Evernote. This application can hold text notes, pdf’s, photos, business cards, recipes, well you get the idea. Once your note is saved it becomes not only accessible from anywhere, but it also becomes searchable, even the text within images if the image is clear enough. That feature is brought to you by the wondrous technology of Optical Character Recognition. Big words for a big job. Why do I bring that particular technology up you might ask, well we’ll get to that in a minute so stop being so impatient.
I truly find Evernote to be the most valuable application I’ve ever downloaded. For me personally, on the phone I take photos of receipts and have them uploaded and indexed. On the desktop I save web pages that have code snippets I want to search through later. Also, after a phone call I’ll pull up my client folder and type in a few notes for quick reference later. On the iPad I store my meeting notes.
When I first started using the iPad for meeting notes I just typed them into Evernote directly with the on screen keyboard, but to be honest, I missed the actual act of writing things down in a pen to paper sort of way. So I tried to do just that, but quickly found I’m not much of a “writing with my fingers” sort of guy. After a quick internet search I found the perfect implement to simulate the real thing. A pogo sketch stylus. This little wonder has a special tip that functions superbly on capacitive screens like the one on the iPad. My only complaint is that I wish it was a tad bit thicker and had a little more heft to it, but thats just splitting hairs.
Armed with the pen, I needed the paper. Unfortunately, as of right now Evernote for the iPad does not take touch/pen type input directly into the note taking features of the app. For that I had to look elsewhere. After trying several different notepad style apps for the iPad I found my biggest problem was the multi touch functionality of the device. I like to rest my palm on the surface when writing. For pen input, that simply wasn’t working. But lo and behold after trying about 5 different solutions I found the one. Penultimate. Penultimate has an option for detecting your palm resting on the screen and ignores it. That leaves you free to write to your hearts content. Now this app isn’t without its shortcomings. Namely the lack of adjusting the pen tip size, but that is hardly enough of a barrier to dimish the usefulness of the app. In fact it’s really not much of a barrier at all in the great scheme of things.
So how does this fit into my Evernote workflow? Penultimate has a handy feature where you can email both a single written page, or an entire notebook. Evernote, in their great wisdom, happens to have issue each user an email address that allows you to email notes into your notebook. Voila, a hand written, searchable note is now accessible wherever I am. Did you catch that searchable part? Told you I’d get back to that character recognition stuff (if your handwriting is clean enough).
That’s my iPad note taking workflow. I think it’s pretty solid but if you think you can improve it, or if yours is just better, let me know below.
I too love to take notes on my iPad and prefer to handwrite rather than type. I also use Evernote as my repository. I was using Penultimate but wasn’t getting enough words on a page so recently switched to the FastFinga app. It has a write in box which will echo smaller to the page, in landscape mode you can move the write box about half way up the screen so that allows you to rest your hand on the screen without it registering, and you can adjust the speed at which it automatically moves the boxed writing to the page so you can write continuously without having to manually enter to move the text. Evernote is one of the listed destination choices so that to is easy. Give it a whirl, if you haven’t already…. You may like it.
Thanks for the suggestion on an alternate note taking app. I’d have to agree that the words per page issue is a big problem with Penultimate. I’ll check out FastFinga.
This is exactly why I bought an iPad. I have been using Evernote for over three years now, yet I still took my Moleskine to meetings and then (occasionally) added those notes to Evernote later. The system was too fragmented and the Moleskine became too valuable and had too much risk (I’d be hosed if I lost it).
The big block for me was diagrams rather than hand-written notes. I draw a lot of pictures, diagrams, and layouts as a software architect and Evernote just wasn’t solving that. One look at the iPad and the apps available tipped me over the edge.
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ll try Penultimate and FastFinga. Have you learned any more in the year since this post? Any other wisdoms or recommendations? (I’ve already ordered the stylus based on your rec. fyi)
Penultimate is still a large part of my workflow, but if you are in a lot of task related meetings I’d recommend Noteshelf. It has a nice meeting template for recording action items. On the stylus front, and I’m lost without one, I’ve switched to the Targus stylus model: AMM01US. It’s a bit more expensive but it’s thicker and heavier so it feels more natural. I have heard some complaints that the tip has a tendency to “grip” the screen but the two that I have had worked perfectly.