I have read a lot of your posts about Circus Ponies Notebook. I have purchased so many notetaking and PDF filing/annotation apps in my quest for the perfect app. I am looking for a single app to replace my current combination of Notability, Goodreader, and Appigo ToDo. They are all very good apps, but I really would love to find one app to keep all my reference PDFs and files that I need to review for information or to provide feedback (thus my current use of Goodreader with links to Appigo ToDo to remind me when I need to finish reviewing a file) with an app that alllows me to take good meeting notes and then create ToDos attached to the meeting notes and keep everything organized and easy to find/retrieve (sorry for the runon sentence). Circus Ponies Notebook for the iPad sounds like it might come close. What do you think? By the way, I have well over a 1000 PDFs in Goodreader.
Yes, I have been on the hunt for the 'perfect multi app' for some time (and have bought way too many apps in the process), but have now given up on finding the hidden treasure and have diversified over a few apps.
For note taking purposes, I am increasingly switching to Evernote, for the following reaons:
- Cross platform app, which matters to me because I work in a windows environment
- better than CPN if you want to import pdf files into a note. Evernote makes them searchable (at least with the premium version, but think that also applies to free alternative), and displays them neatly at the bottom of your note - in contrast, CPN creates a separate page for every page in the PDF file, which I really don't want. I also deal with several thousand PDF files in my library, so I need pdf management to be smooth.
- so many apps offer Evernote integration, and it's really easy to add and categories notes by email.
I still think CPN is an excellent app, though, but I don't think their iPad version is their strongest side. But it has a lot of features, great outlining, to do lists, great multidex, ability to tag text (as opposed to files/notes/pages) which are all very good for getting organised.
I've settled on a combo of apps, at the moment it looks like this:
- Sente for pdf management (hub for all my research literature)
- iAnnotate for marking up pdfs and other docs
- CPN or Evernote (kind of in the process of switching from the former to the latter I think, but haven't fully decided) as a hub for all my academic note taking.
- OmniFocus for organising to do-s and project management.
- Curio for managing writing projects.
In my work flow, I distinguish between 'hubs', where information should end up, and 'intermediaries', where I may edit, create and mark up docs, which is then forward to a hub where it 'lives' permanently. I use of bunch of other intermediaries depending on need (e.g. Notability, 7NotesHD, Drafts, ByWord, etc), but stuff doesn't stay there, it's forwarded to a 'hub'.