Description
Editors' Choice: "Bottom Line: Affordably-priced and feature-rich, Note Taker HD is the iPad app for professionals in need of note-taking software." -PCMag.com, June 2011
Note Taker HD is a powerful app for writing and organizing handwritten notes, diagrams, etc., on the iPad. It can also be used to annotate PDF files. It can shrink your writing so you can easily fit a lot of text on a page. You can read the reduced-size "ink" as if you had written those letters with a very fine pen. It gives you solid functionality and control to produce the pages you need.
Documents are flexibly organized by tags, date/time last modified, favorites, and more, with a scrolling list of thumbnail images of part of each page to help you find them later. You can email one or more pages as a single PDF file, "Open In" other apps, or, if your iPad supports it, print.
Note Taker HD lets you create pages by writing on the screen with your finger or an iPad-compatible stylus. You can either write directly on the page for large drawings, or have the "ink" you write shrunk down. You can write in large letters on the screen rather than trying to make tiny motions like a pencil. You just keep writing and Note Taker HD automatically adds new writing next to the old. To quickly correct mistakes, it has multi-level undo and redo buttons as well as an eraser -- just drag your finger over the page to erase the "ink" under it.
You can zoom in and out on a page using the pinch gesture while viewing or editing. The Zoomed Editing window lets you see both a zoomed-out overview and a zoomed-in close-up writing area at the same time.
You can use "Open In" in other apps or iTunes to send PDF files to Note Taker HD for annotation.
Other features include:
- Support for the retina display on new iPads
- Pages organized into documents and folders
- Typed blocks of text with optional borders
- 60+ highly customizable shapes
- Insert and crop images from Photo Albums, Pasteboard, or the iPad camera
- Custom backgrounds from images or PDF pages
- Free templates and clip art on the support web site
- VGA/HDMI/AirPlay support with zoom and pan
- Wrist guard to avoid inadvertent touches
- Layout variations better suited to some left-handed users
- Optional fields in output footers like in a word processor
- Extensive built-in help
- Smooth and crisp ink on screen and in PDF output
- Share editable copies of your documents with others
- Backup to a single file for off-iPad storage
- Password protected folders
- Support for the iOS Data Protection API
- Full-screen preview mode
- Copy/Cut/Paste between pages
Note Taker HD was designed and programmed by Dan Bricklin, the same person who over 30 years ago came up with VisiCalc, the pioneering electronic spreadsheet that made working with numbers on a personal computer so easy.
To see it in action, click on the Support link here or go directly to www.notetakerhd.com.
What's New in Version 6.7
This upgrade adds support for the retina display, image cropping, manual PDF page rotation, and the ability to see a list of only those PDF pages you have written on in a document. It also has various bug fixes, speedups, and minor enhancements.
iPad Screenshots
Customer Reviews
Not shiny but gets the job done well
There are now lots of note-taking apps offering great and various features. But I give props to this app's developer because in the app's early days, it focuses on functionality more than other developers. Such functionalities include Open In, left-handed mode, document orientation, margin, footer, paper size, PDF annotation, tag, shapes, export multiple docs as one, un/staple pages from/to a doc, API protection etc. but most importantly, stability. No app is perfect; this app could use some vibrant color.
Here is my feature wish list to make the app better:
> audio recording with backgrounding support
> RGB/color wheel for ink and background
> page jump
> standard iOS document page transition
> save doc to highest quality possible JPEG w/ background color
> pencil
> other color than black in the UI color pairs
> gesture for range (tap and hold at starting and end points), swipe to delete, and invert selection
Continues to be the best!
I have been using this app for well over a year now, and have come to depend on it for much of my day to day work. With each update it only gets better, and the support for the new iPad is both thorough and also thoughtful.
By that I mean the tool provides options about how detailed and fine the resolution should be, enabling the user to balance speed of rendering with crispness of display. That is a thoughtful touch and one I appreciate greatly.
Ok, so just in case this is your first time considering Note Taker HD, all I can say is that I have purchased (and keep installed) the other four top note taking apps (so that I can see what they are up to) and I continue to use only this one.
For my needs, the navigation and screen layout is just about perfect -- other apps try to be very cute or clever, or they throw too much in there and end up losing me in piles of distractions. Tis one is clean and elegant.
I continue to find this ink to be the smoothest and also most responsive of the bunch, and its annotation and markup capabilities have freed me to leave iAnnotate behind as well. And its export to PDF continues to shine.
So let's wrap this up with another kudo to the development team for their terrific work. If you use this app, update to the new version now. If you do not yet have this app, give it a try -- for real, day to day work, this one is the best.
Finally, I can leave behind the notebook!
I've been keeping a hand-written journal for more than thirty years. I'm a writer and a poet who uses my notebooks to jot my original ideas, map out drafts of new work, and basically chronicle my life. My dream has been to find an app for the iPad that would allow me to finally leave behind the 100 page paper binders full of college-ruled notebook paper, that has been my chosen style, and finally do all my journal writing directly on the iPad.
I had several criteria before I felt I could make the transition to an app: First, it had to look and feel as much like my beloved college-ruled notebook paper as possible. Second, it had to be responsive, and keep up with my wicked fast writing style. Third, it had to output to PDF for achiving. Fourth, it had to have a good tool set for writing in various colors of ink, highlighting, and drawing. Fifith, it needed to backup and keep my work safe.
After buying and trying out a half dozen contenders, I've finally found an app that is very, very close to perfect. Note Taker HD meets all my criteria, and has finally allowed me to break the attachment to the written page. Between e-books and dropping the paper journal binders, I have now significantly lightened the load in my backpack, as I traipse around the world.
I do have a couple suggestions to make the product even better: First, I'd like to be able to have a few more options for line widths on the paper templates. The regular lined paper actually still has a few more lines than standard college ruled notebook paper, and still feels a bit cramped. Second, the system desperately needs to have automatic syncing options for a service like Dropbox. I love having the ability to backup, but I'd like to not have to worry about doing that manually. But both of those things are minor. This app is definetly the best few bucks I've ever spent on an iPad tool.
EXCELLENT WORK, FOLKS! Keep those updates coming!
- $4.99
- Category: Productivity
- Updated: Apr 13, 2012
- Version: 6.7
- Size: 3.9 MB
- Language: English
- Seller: Software Garden, Inc.
- © 2011 Software Garden, Inc.
Requirements: Compatible with iPad.Requires iOS 4.3 or later.
