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In this tutorial, we'll talk about Note Taking Apps.
What I'll do is show you some of the features of these note taking apps,
including iAnnotate, Evernote, the native iPad Notes app,
Noteshelf and Penultimate, Notability, and the Android app, Super Note.
You can follow along and evaluate the note taking apps
based on what you would like to have in your functionality.
Notability now has more functionality than it used to.
It integrates on your iPad with Dropbox. So it is exclusively an Apple or iOS app.
As as you can see here in these screenshots that they include
on their website about Notability, it allows you to do lots of annotations,
and you can go ahead and highlight them, circle things if you want to,
and now that itintegrates with Dropbox, you can read, annotate, and update things with Dropbox,
which makes it an incredibly useful app.
If you've saved a bunch of articles or PDFs to your iPad or Android tablet,
you can use iAnnotate to highlight them and make notes.
And this is really useful for annotating large amounts of articles.
So this one works a little bit like Notability does.
It has the same interactivity with PDFs, but it does not integrate with Dropbox.
Evernote is an app that integrates just like Dropbox or Google Drive does,
because there is an application that you can use
on your desktop or laptop as well as on any smart phone of tablet device.
But, instead of being for PDFs, it's just for taking notes,
which you can capture via video, image, or your own text,
and it automatically will synchronize throughout all of your different devices where you have Evernote installed.
Two apps that have kind of the same functionality, they allow you to do lots of drawings and annotate things really nicely,
are Penultimate and Noteshelf. The one major difference between those two is that Noteshelf seems to have
a deeper, richer, and more graphical interface that allows you to create notebooks
essentially using any kind of paper, including legal pad or musical notation, which is pretty cool.
If you're working on the iPad you'll notice that their native Notes app,
when you take notes in it, will automatically save to your GMail or Google Mail account. So it will create a folder just like this,
and that's where your notes will go automatically.
I really like that feature, because when I'm searching for my mail, it will bring up all the notes that I might have on that same topic.
Super Note is my absolute most favorite note taking app that there is, but unfortunately,
it's only available on the Android platform for the more recent Android software.
What it does is if you're typing with your fingers it will just record that text,
but if you're writing with your hand or with your stylus, it will take your handwriting,
even if you write in a really big font, and it will put it in-line in the text, just like this one.
I'm going to just recap this quick overview here.
So, iAnnotate marks up PDFs on tablet devices. Evernote synchronizes notes in the form of images, video, text, and more.
The native iPad Notes app functions on iOS only, and it synchronizes the notes that you take in your Google mail folders.
Noteshelf and Penultimate have robust drawing utilities and rich features, and they're only available via iOS.
Notability will synchronize with Dropbox, allows you to annotate PDFs, and it also takes notes and has a drawing utility.
Super Note, which is only available an Android, allows us to take notes using text,
but also puts your handwriting into a smaller-sized font.
It's up to you to decide which one is going to work for you, and you may find that
a combination of these note taking apps works the best.
If you ever need help with any of these issues, you can always contact us at
Albertson's Library, at library.boisestate.edu