Despite coming preloaded with a perfectly adequate Note app, both the original iPhone and iPad have plethora of options on the Notes front – from even simpler plain text Getting Things Done style outings to feature packed, skeuomorphic eye-candy.
Noteability comes in at the feature packed end of the scale, and as such, is pretty sweet. It looks amazing – with a great use of font (Gill Sans if you care about such things) and design in the actual writing section of the app. Tool bar above and below the writing section of the screen means you only really get 8 lines to work with on the default font size setting (22), although this did seem to help me focus on individual paragraphs when writing.
In terms of actual features, Noteabilty felt more like a light word processing app than a simple notes editor as it is crammed with goodies.
The most striking is the audio function, which enables you to record as you type – handy if you are jotting down points in a meeting or hashing out ideas. Or even if you just talk to yourself a lot. You can playback audio in general or the audio for the specific word you typed at the time. Clever stuff.
There is also a picture editor that lets you drop images in with your text. Again this is done in a clever way. As you’d expect, there’s the ability to browse photos on your iPad and insert them. Unexpected however, is the ability to edit those images in the basic but functional image editor built into the app. It doesn’t stop there. You can insert “Figures” which are essentially doodles – depending on your level of artistic skill. The Figures interface is the same as the one that pops up for photos and is better than you’d expect for a simple note taking app. There is also a built-in browser, which enables you to clip in pages from the web – especially handy if you employ Hollywood’s ghostwriter – Wikipedia.
Notes can be emailed, dragged through the hell that is iTunes file management or Dropboxed. I’d like to go on record as saying that everything should sync with DropBox. It’s amazing.
If you do all your note taking on the iPad, it’s hard not to recommend Noteabilty. As a devout SimpleNote user, I can’t quite abandon it’s amazing cloud-based approach, but Noteablity is a solid contender.
AppSafari review of Notability was written by Shem Pennant on February 11th, 2011 and categorized under App Store, iPad apps, Notes, Productivity. Page viewed 6660 times, 2 so far today. Need help on using these apps? Please read the Help Page.
Version 3 looks nothing like the photos above, and infact is quite awful. I have emailed the developer my feedback and have been ignored, so i posted to the Facebook page, and my post was deleted.
I appreciate that one can change the colours, but the whole candy interface is still an eyesore (as compared to refined, subtle, classy and mature textured tan leather look of version 2. Even the app icon has changed from leather book to candy blue). The file browser names are much bigger font (and cannot be changed) and the bubbles around each folder are massive. I don’t need a fluorescent yellow cartoon/icon next to each subject group, surrounded my fluorescent yellow highlighting with fat psychedelic colours around it. Each item now resembles the windows7 start menu.
Furthermore the forced page breaks are a disaster also, they cannot be disabled, I have been happily storing documents that i had written in macjournal, and exported to RTFD. They have a combination of pictures and text, your forced page breaks are a disaster to my photos, I can only fit 2 photos per page, and the next photo cannot follow (across a page break) hence the text is messed up, and the photos are all messed up (and cannot be resited across hard page breaks).
Do not update to version 3 !