After resisting the temptation for several months, I finally broke down this week and bought an Apple Pencil. I purchased the initial iPad Pro back in November when it first came out, but sold it and switched to the 9.7-inch model last week, and so far I’ve been very happy with that choice. Figuring that I’ll probably stick with this size iPad Pro for at least a year, I decided the Apple Pencil would be a worthwhile investment. And I was right.

• Program For Taking Notes
• Tips For Taking Notes In Class
• Taking Notes Blog
• Computer Program For Taking Notes
• Taking Notes For A Research Paper
• Best Program For Taking Note On Pdf For Mac

I was skeptical of the Apple Pencil when it was first announced, as I assumed it would just be the same as the tacky styluses third-parties had been making for years, but after using it I’ve realized just how wrong I was. The thing that I noticed very early on in my time with the Apple Pencil though, was how crazy good the palm rejection is. Writing with an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro is nearly as easy as writing on actual paper. As a student, this is a huge factor for me when it comes to note taking, so I decided to dive a little deeper into the apps on iOS that are made for taking notes and are optimized for iPad Pro. Here are some of the ones I would recommend…

• Notational Velocity is a simple note taking app for Mac that was created around taking super fast notes without ever having to take your hands off the keyboard. With shortcuts and ways to easily start new notes and link to others, it's one of the quickest options around, once you learn the shortcuts.
• The iSkysoft PDF Editor 6 Professional for Mac (or iSkysoft PDF Editor 6 Professional for Windows) is the best PDF tool in the market which has made PDF manipulation easy. With the help of this PDF tool, you can easily make notes on PDF.

GoodNotes 4

Program For Taking Notes

An avid technology writer and an IT guru, Matthew is here to help bring the best in software, hardware and the web to the collective consciousness of TechRepublic's readership. If that’s the case, take a look at our roundup of some of the most used note taking apps for Mac. We will cover both basic and complex applications, leaving you the choice of what fits your needs best. Be sure to take a look at our companion roundup over at iPhone.AppStorm, looking at.

GoodNotes is an app that I wasn’t entirely familiar with until I purchased my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, but I’ve quickly realized that it’s one of, if not the most, complete note taking apps available in the App Store. You have the ability to create multiple notebooks – like one for each class or subject – and then create individual pages within each notebook with varying page styles. There’s also the ability to insert charts and images which definitely comes in handy.

GoodNotes also indexes your notes so you can quickly search them. I have pretty awful handwriting, but it was still able to correctly index my notes and allow me to search through them when I needed to. It also supports the Apple Pencil for pressure sensitive writing, something that really comes in handy while taking extensive amounts of notes at a time.

To me, GoodNotes 4 felt most similar to traditional notebooks when it came to taking notes. It really felt like writing with pen and paper, just modernized with many new features. GoodNotes 4 is available for $7.99 on the App Store and is definitely worth it.

Notability

Notability and GoodNotes are very similar apps on the surface, and if anything, Notability feels slightly more polished and easier to use than GoodNotes. It offers many of the same features as other handwriting apps, including palm-rejection, pressure sensitivity detection, and the ability to insert images, charts, and even full webpages. That last feature is notable as it means you can import a webpage and highlight and mark it up as you go, something that’s important for working through research projects and the like.

One thing that’s unfortunately missing and that will ultimately force me to stick with GoodNotes, however, is the ability to search handwritten notes. While you can search PDF text, any notes you write by hand are not capable of being searched.

On the bright side though, Notability is currently 33 percent off on the App Store, making it just $3.99 as of this post.

Notes Plus

Notes Plus is another solid note taking app with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil optimizations. In addition to standard features like PDF and image support, folder management, and shape detection, Notes Plus includes a few standout features. For one, it supports a built-in browser for quickly and easily looking up facts and statistics. Additionally, it supports the ability to covert handwritten notes to text.

This means that any handwritten notes are also searchable and later annotatable, unlike with Notability. There’s also support for recording background audio. For instance, if you’re in a lecture, you can be recording that lecture directly into the app so you can later go back and listen to it to ensure you didn’t miss anything.

Notes Plus is currently 30 percent off in the App Store, making it $6.99 as of this past.

Noteshelf

In terms of pure writing experience, Noteshelf offers one of the smoothest experiences of any of these apps. The app supports the Apple Pencil and offers integration with Spotlight on iOS so you can quickly find different documents and notebooks. Unfortunately, there’s no way to search within handwritten notes like with Penultimate and GoodNotes.

One nice feature of Noteshelf, however, is that you can add a passcode to protect important and sensitive notes, much like what Apple added to its Notes app with iOS 9.3.

Noteshelf prides itself as the best note-taking app that offers the most beautiful handwriting effect – this is one of the key reasons why our users fall in love with Noteshelf. It perfectly mimics that intuitive ink-on-paper feeling so smoothly, it’s as if you’re using a real pen and paper.

Noteshelf is available for $7.99 on the App Store.

Evernote

Evernote isn’t the most feature-rich app when it comes to using the Apple Pencil for note taking, but if you already use Evernote across other devices, it’s nice to stay in the same ecosystem. The stylus can be used for essentially handwriting notes in the most basic format. Evernote is more reasonable to use if you’re typing notes and need to quickly sketch a chart or a diagram. For use cases like this, Evernote’s “Snap to Shape” feature is useful.

The biggest selling point of Evernote is its cross-platform availability, so if you’re often switching between devices and operating systems for taking notes, then Evernote might be your best bet. It’s available on the App Store for free with various premium upgrades.

Penultimate

Made by Evernote, Penultimate is the company’s more advanced take on a handwriting app. Penultimate features a distraction-free interface that makes it easy to quickly and easily take down notes without accidentally changing settings or navigating away from the writing interface. The app is optimized for iPad Pro, as well, which means that it supports pressure sensitivity, so you can push harder for thicker lettering and lighter for more faint writing.

Furthermore, and perhaps most notably, Penultimate analyzes your handwritten notes and allows you to search for handwritten text in the app. Penultimate is free with a host of in-app purchases to improve your experience.

Apple Notes

You can’t discuss note taking apps without mentioning Apple’s own Notes app that comes pre-installed on every iOS device. Prior to iOS 9, Apple’s Notes app was pretty lackluster in comparison to many note taking apps on iOS. With the new operating system, however, the app is gaining on third-party solutions. It still doesn’t support things like searching notes or even different page styles, but it’s improving.

There are however, new features such as additional font formatting options, support for inline checklists, and link thumbnail + textual previews.

Wrap-up

Ultimately the moral of the story here is that the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro have convinced me that the iPad is now a viable way to quickly take notes in a variety of settings. Whether it be in meetings or in class, the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro paired with any of these apps makes for a note taking experience equivalent to that of pen and paper.

Personally, after trying all of these apps, I think GoodNotes 4 is the most solid choice for iPad Pro note taking. Its amazing handwriting recognition and search feature really sets it apart from the competition. For someone with awful handwriting, I didn’t think a feature like that would ever work for me. But GoodNotes proved me wrong.

What do you use for taking notes with your iPhone/iPad? Let us know in the comments!

Man, it’s a great time to be a note-taker.

For a couple of decades—first as a student, then as a professional journalist—I filled notebook after notebook with notes, covering classes, press conferences, interviews, and more. When I was done, I’d have to find someplace to store them until (most likely) I’d throw them out. The notes I did keep? Useless. My on-the-fly handwriting is a horrible thing.

The result: A lot of personal and professional history gone to waste.

The process got better when laptop adoption became widespread and I could start typing my notes in real time as a speech or lecture was being delivered. It improved yet again when Google Docs came along, and storage ceased to be a worry.

Mobile devices, though, transformed everything. The productivity charts in the app stores are awash in great note-taking apps, ranging from the complicated—Evernote would let you describe every part of your life with enough detail to satisfy three of the five senses—to the useful-but-relatively-one-dimensional (think of the naive Notes app on iOS). For the first time in decades, I don’t have to carry pen and paper everywhere I go. All I need is my smartphone, and I’m ready to go to class, conduct an interview, or cover a fire as a breaking news story.

So which app is the best?

To determine that, TechHive picked a number of note-taking apps, popular either with the public—as determined by the iOS and Android app store charts—or which have received sterling notices in the tech press. And to test them, I used each in my everyday life—for reporting and writing news stories, as well as everyday tasks like making grocery lists, or to store away a great thought or quote.

I had three criteria for judging these note-taking apps: They had to be versatile. They had to help me get organized, easily and intuitively. And they had to be accessible—a note that will live on my iPhone and my iPhone only is not a note that’s ultimately useful to me: I might take the notes on a mobile device, but I might write a paper or a story on a laptop or desktop— so I want quick, easy access to the notes in both locations.

Oh, and while I used Apple gear in the testing of these apps, I didn’t want to preclude the idea that someday soon I might switch to a Nexus tablet instead: The apps had to be available on both major mobile platforms, to give users maximum flexibility.

The winner: Evernote

Um, surprise?

There’s a reason Evernote (free; iOS and Android) is generally thought of as a best-in-class note-taker: It’s the best in class, and it easily surpassed my desires in each of the three criteria I was judging by:

• Versatility: I took my iPad to a morning breaking-news conference and fired up the app. I typed in notes during the question-and-answer portion of the presser, used the app to take pictures of charts displayed during the event, and after it was over used the microphone to record a quick on-the-spot interview with one of the participants. Shifting between functions was seamless: I just clicked the “Add Attachment” button in the upper right-hand corner, chose which medium to operate in, and moved on from there. Easy as pie.
• Great organization: This didn’t matter so much at the press conference, but Evernote is easily—and endlessly—organizable. You can create notebooks to cover broad topics, and then create individual notes in each. Plus, you can tag the notes, to further refine your searches and your overall ability to find your information later.
• Accessibility: When the press conference was over, I put my iPad away, rushed back to the office, fired up my computer, and immediately opened Evernote on the Web: Everything was right there—and would’ve been if I’d tried accessing it on Android or a Windows computer, too. (I could also have downloaded Evernote for Mac, but I hadn’t done that. In any case, I’d rather shift back and forth between browser tabs than shift between apps; your own mileage may vary.) The story was finished within about 30 minutes. That’s efficiency, folks.

If there’s a drawback, it’s that the free account limits you to 60 MB of uploads per month: Power users beware. But upgrading to a premium account—and up to 1 GB of data uploads per month—costs just $45 a year.

The runner-up: Simplenote

No, this app isn’t nearly as versatile as Evernote. Simplenote(free; iOS and Android)—as the name implies—is simple. You write stuff down, and that’s it.

Tips For Taking Notes In Class

Then again, the vast majority of the note taking I do is just writing stuff down. And one person’s versatility can be another person’s clutter can be another person’s app overstuffed with features.

How can the answer be improved? Program for mac to unzip files.

When it comes down to it, Simplenote isn’t that stripped down—and it’s certainly an improvement in several ways over the native iOS Notes app: For one thing, cut-and-paste quotes are stripped of coding, so everything you paste and type has the same, simple text-style font and format. And you can tag each note as much as you want, making organization a snap.

What’s more, Simplenote is easily accessible: It’s available as a Web app, and as a download for iOS, Mac, Android, and Kindle devices. But don’t be fooled by this name: In this case simplicity is a virtue, in the cause of simply getting stuff done.

Best for Microsoft users: Microsoft OneNote

While I found Evernote and Simplenote to be the best overall note-taking apps, others stood out for specific features, which you might want to consider depending on your needs.

Taking Notes Blog

Microsoft OneNote (free; iOS and Android) is a lot like Evernote—and yet not quite enough like Evernote.

Like Evernote, it’s versatile: It’s easy to add pictures, tables, and hyperlinks to your notes. Like Evernote, you can organize your notes into broad notebooks and narrower note entries. And like Evernote, it’s accessible via a broad array of devices, including for Mac and iOS. So that’s good!

Unlike Evernote, it lacks an audio recording capability, and thus there’s no opportunity to review a lecture or interview to make sure you wrote down everything correctly. Also unlike Evernote, accessing notes on other devices is not a seamless transition. OneNote.com (the app’s Web version) offered me ads for related Microsoft products, but it never showed a way to get past the ads and simply make notes when using Safari. (It performed better in Firefox.)

The app does offer lots of formatting options, but that almost seems like a distraction: It’s as if Microsoft Word had been grafted onto a note-taking app. That’ll be fine for some users, but I prefer the focus of a task-focused app.

So why use it? The prime audience will, of course, be current Microsoft customers, especially users of its OneDrive cloud-based system for creating documents and presentations. If you’re not already a Microsoft fan, this app won’t be quite as alluring.

Best stylus companion: Penultimate

This is a specialty note-taker worth mentioning, because some people just like the feel of a stylus in their hand when taking notes. Penultimate (free; iPad) rewards them with a responsive user interface that allows for both taking notes and sketching. And it’s part of the Evernote ecosystem, making it easy to access your hand-written notes and drawings on other devices aside from your iPad.

Others of note

This is a good time to mention that there aren’t really any bad note-taking apps out there. It’s just that some aren’t superlative as others. The following apps all have their strengths, save one: All of them are built primarily for iOS. If you’re an Android user, you might want to turn to well-regarded offerings like Papryus (free), Note Everything (free), or Google Keep (free).

Notability ($3) remains among my favorite note-takers: It’s like a mix of Evernote and Penultimate, letting users create notes using a range of techniques—handwriting, typing, taking pictures, capturing audio, and more. Its best feature? If you’ve recorded a lecture and taken notes simultaneously, Notability syncs the two—just tap a word in the middle of your notes, and the app will find that same spot in the audio, helping you rediscover and remember the context of your half-formed thought.

App developer Ginger Labs recently launched a companion app for the Mac ($10; OS X 10.9 or later), where you can sync your notes via iCloud across devices. If you're not a Mac user, you can still access your notes on a computer, but only by syncing your account with Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, or webDAV. Students may find its audio sync feature especially helpful for taking notes during long lectures.

Super Note (free) shares a lot of Notability’s features, but with a simpler and perhaps more intuitive user interface: It only incorporates typed notes, pictures, and recordings. It may also go a little further in helping you get organized, with color-coded arrows to guide the way. You’ve got one option for syncing to your desktop computer: Dropbox.

Computer Program For Taking Notes

NoteMaster ($4) has separate apps for the iPhone and iPad. They both feature plenty of formatting options, easy organizing rules, and the ability to insert photos. You can sync the notes using Google Docs or Dropbox. (However, if you’re thinking about using the Google Docs app to take notes on a mobile device: Don’t. Get this app, and you’ll have a more pleasant visual experience, at the very least.)

Taking Notes For A Research Paper

Vesper ($3) isn’t really a classroom app: It’s an iPhone-only offering (though that may change soon) that’s built more for an individual’s on-the-fly thinking. Got an idea for that song you’re writing? Jot it down quickly. Want to make a poem about that pretty flower? Take a picture and jot down your thoughts. The app has limited syncing options—basically, unless you send the notes in an SMS message or an email, will only be able to access it from… your other iPhones also equipped with the Vesper app. But stay tuned: This app may have a different story to tell next semester.

There is no shortage of good note-taking apps out there, and your criteria may differ from mine. Though Evernote will likely be the best choice for most users, you should feel free to try several of these options—most of them have free versions—and see what works for you.

Best Program For Taking Note On Pdf For Mac

Editor's note: This article was updated on 09/03/2014 at 4:45 PM PST to highlight Notability's new app for the Mac and to correct a typo.