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Ask Slashdot: What's a Good Tablet/App Combination For Note-Taking?
EmagGeek writes "My wife recently started back to school to finish her 4-year degree, and one of the things that we've been considering is procuring for her some kind of tablet that would enable her to take notes in class and save them electronically. This would obviate the need to carry around a bunch of paper, and could even be used to store e-textbooks so she doesn't have to lug 30lbs of books around campus. At minimum, she would have to be able to write freehand on the tablet with a fine-point stylus, just like she would write on paper with a pen. We've seen what we call those 'fat finger' styli and found that they are not good for fine writing. Having become frustrated with the offerings we've tried so far, I thought I would ping the Slashdot Community. Any suggestions?"
I use an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard as well as a pen. For general lectures or notes in a class where there are few equations, the keyboard is great. For a few figures or equations I can zoom in and draw with my finger (in the same notebook app that I am typing in) or even quickly google the figures I see in the presentation and paste them directly into my notes. For my cosmology class, heavy on general relativity, I find that I can't type the equations fast enough and so switch to an app which has fantastic stylus response. Both apps allow exporting as PDF (among other things) and so for classes where I use both notebooks, I export to PDF and merge the pages in the proper order.
Apps: iNotes (typing with light figure work) and NoteShelf (fantastic pen work with Griffen pen). The 'fatness' of the stylus is not an issue and for particularly fine writing you can write in a 'zoomed' area and have it appear on the page at a smaller size. The app also recognizes your wrist as opposed to where you are writing so that you can just write directly on the page. They also have lousy screenshots on their website...the control you have over line shape is superb. Both apps allow organizing your notes in different notebooks so that you can separate out your classes.
The one thing I would still like is a better app for general note taking. iNotes is fine for typing but the drawing tools are rather limited. A previous app that I used, Notify, was fantastic until it crashed 45 minutes into a class taking all of my notes with it. Both iNotes and NoteShelf have been stable and I have never lost any notes.