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Using an iPad to take notes in lectures?

Love taking notes with my iPad. For me, typing on the touch screen took around 3 days to get use to and become efficient with it. I usually type on my leg (y'know, that weird ass male sitting position involving the leg over the knee, not the girly squish your balls position, the manly, I have balls position... geddit?) and I'm happy to say it has replaced my laptop for note taking. I have an iMac at home for my more heavy duty stuff. But I've been using pages thus far and it has served me excellently. But a user spoke of noterize below. I also highly recommend it, pretty much all he says is true. But pages has always been more convenient... don't ask me why. I just prefer it.

Aaaaand when a lecture just gets plain boringly stupid, I crank out my plants vs zombies... Good times. :D Yeah, downside of the ipad? Incredibly distracting when it wants to be.
 
sweetchilliphil said:
Love taking notes with my iPad. For me, typing on the touch screen took around 3 days to get use to and become efficient with it. I usually type on my leg (y'know, that weird ass male sitting position involving the leg over the knee, not the girly squish your balls position, the manly, I have balls position... geddit?) and I'm happy to say it has replaced my laptop for note taking. I have an iMac at home for my more heavy duty stuff. But I've been using pages thus far and it has served me excellently. But a user spoke of noterize below. I also highly recommend it, pretty much all he says is true. But pages has always been more convenient... don't ask me why. I just prefer it.

Aaaaand when a lecture just gets plain boringly stupid, I crank out my plants vs zombies... Good times. :D Yeah, downside of the ipad? Incredibly distracting when it wants to be.
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I have a feeling all of my professors will want to check out my iPad the first time I use it. -_-
 
Briview said:
I have plenty of experience with the iPad for notes, as I'm a student in Berkeley and got my iPad upon release (April 3rd) and took it to my very first lecture on day one (Monday, April 5th). Since then, I've been using it for school work and papers. I think that's what Pages is about and best for. Yet no app that I have tested (Wondershare iDraft, Memos, Evernote, SoundPaper HD to name a few)
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Thanks for mentioning Soundpaper. I use it exclusively for lectures and have had fantastic results with it - for typing, recording lectures and drawing sketches.. The other apps look intriguing and I'll have a look at them.
 
I love taking notes in class with my iPad. I still am considering getting a keyboard dock though, the dock is kinda hard to resist for me.
 
after experimenting with some "class room typing" in which I would try and take of what I heard on TV, I think I will be buying the blutooth keyboard. I would go for the dock for but I don't want the iPad to be sitting in portrait mode in front of me. I feel it would be too distracting. I'll use my case to prop it up a bit just to be able to glance down every once in a while to make sure things are going smoothly and maybe even have the keyboard in my lap.

I just find myself having too many accidental touches with my right hand (either palm or thumb hitting the numeric keyboard or something else and throwing everything off). So it will be blutooth keyboard for me whenever I get back into school.
 
Ok. After hearing what a few of you said about Noterize I went ahead and got it for myself and let me just say that it is AWESOME!

While I am still not crazy about typing on a touchscreen that app paired with a Bluetooth keyboard would be phenomenal.
 
sweetchilliphil said:
Love taking notes with my iPad. For me, typing on the touch screen took around 3 days to get use to and become efficient with it. I usually type on my leg (y'know, that weird ass male sitting position involving the leg over the knee, not the girly squish your balls position, the manly, I have balls position... geddit?) and I'm happy to say it has replaced my laptop for note taking. I have an iMac at home for my more heavy duty stuff. But I've been using pages thus far and it has served me excellently. But a user spoke of noterize below. I also highly recommend it, pretty much all he says is true. But pages has always been more convenient... don't ask me why. I just prefer it.
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Thanks! :D Glad to have some reply to my post, finally! I understand that Pages is more convenient, and I would have definitely agreed if I didn't have any use for recording the lectures, but as my exams are extremely difficult, we must pretty much understand every little word that the professor says!

uraniumwilly said:
Thanks for mentioning Soundpaper. I use it exclusively for lectures and have had fantastic results with it - for typing, recording lectures and drawing sketches.. The other apps look intriguing and I'll have a look at them.
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You're welcome. Soundpaper is fantastic for measuring the exact bit of where you were typing some notes synced with what the speaker was stating at that moment. It's king of the notes apps when it comes to those sorts of details, if it's necessary for you. ;)

OGDaniel said:
I love taking notes in class with my iPad. I still am considering getting a keyboard dock though, the dock is kinda hard to resist for me.
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vastoholic said:
after experimenting with some "class room typing" in which I would try and take of what I heard on TV, I think I will be buying the blutooth keyboard. I would go for the dock for but I don't want the iPad to be sitting in portrait mode in front of me. I feel it would be too distracting. I'll use my case to prop it up a bit just to be able to glance down every once in a while to make sure things are going smoothly and maybe even have the keyboard in my lap.

I just find myself having too many accidental touches with my right hand (either palm or thumb hitting the numeric keyboard or something else and throwing everything off). So it will be blutooth keyboard for me whenever I get back into school.
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OGDaniel and vastoholic, do take note that some classes may not have desks with enough space to whip out your iPad and put your BT keyboard on your lap... it can be inconvenient at times too, but if you feel like that's what's best for you, then you won't be sorry. :p

blokey said:
Ok. After hearing what a few of you said about Noterize I went ahead and got it for myself and let me just say that it is AWESOME!

While I am still not crazy about typing on a touchscreen that app paired with a Bluetooth keyboard would be phenomenal.
Click to expand...

Yup, it is definitely awesome! Happy I could recommend something for you to use. :)
 
blokey said:
Ok. After hearing what a few of you said about Noterize I went ahead and got it for myself and let me just say that it is AWESOME!
Click to expand...

+1

I hadn't realised how well it would work in client meetings when they're commenting on design work. This way, I can send the draft with feedback to the designer as well as retain the audio and supporting notes for reference. Excellent stuff!
 
@Briview, yes I remember the desks they had. Most classes I had auditorium like seating with the desk top folding up and over from the side and was usually tiny, but would be big enough to set the iPad on. Hopefully they haven't changed that much on 4 years and will still have similar desks.
 
Timothy said:
This is one of the reasons why I think it's paramount for Apple to add handwriting recognition to the iPad. Taking notes in a class or a meeting is just so much more natural this way.

Join my Facebook group to ask Apple to do just that!

FB: Apple, Add Handwriting Recognition to the iPad
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I would definitely support that. All I would want is the same level of notetaking capabilities that we used to have on Newtons. There I could combine handwritten and typed notes with drawings, diagrams, etc. It worked really well.
 
lillianad said:
+1

I hadn't realised how well it would work in client meetings when they're commenting on design work. This way, I can send the draft with feedback to the designer as well as retain the audio and supporting notes for reference. Excellent stuff!
Click to expand...

Wow! I precisely just did the same thing in Noterize, like three weeks ago. What a coincidence to see it on here. :D

vastoholic said:
@Briview, yes I remember the desks they had. Most classes I had auditorium like seating with the desk top folding up and over from the side and was usually tiny, but would be big enough to set the iPad on. Hopefully they haven't changed that much on 4 years and will still have similar desks.
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That's exactly right... they remain the same way so far, just as long as you're fine with the iPad taking up the entire space of the small, folding desk tops in the auditorium (that you don't have any other papers/books/materials to set down on there...) then it's all good. ;)
 
Jaro65 said:
I would definitely support that. All I would want is the same level of notetaking capabilities that we used to have on Newtons. There I could combine handwritten and typed notes with drawings, diagrams, etc. It worked really well.
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+1000

Cannot imagine what the Newton would have been like at this stage. I used to have my main unit and 2 backups. Just in case. Considering 1 backup for the iPad since I'm using it more and more extensively
 
ShiftyGray said:
Sorry but that is just ridiculous. It costs way too much time and it's way too inconvenient to use two separate apps for this purpose.

What is needed is an app that allows you to type and quickly switch to drawing mode so you can use both types of note-taking in a quick intuitive manner. Strangely I have found none that do this well. Most either focus only on just drawing or just typing, and those that do combine them don't do it well.

Does anyone know of an app that does do it well?
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HelvetiNote
Note: the site triggers Safari's malware notice—I'm not at all sure why, it's very much a legitimate site, without any crazy browser-rooting Javascript or anything like that.
 
Try "Note Taker HD"

It's the best note taking app I ever use. It automatically shrinks your big hand writings to fit them in lines.
 
Notes Plus

Notes Plus just came out for the iPad and looks like exactly what could be the trick. Doesn't have OCR search tho. Maybe in an update one day.
 
Wow, I was pretty skeptical about Notes Plus until I watched that demo video. Being able to mix typing and hand written notes/drawings is a pretty cool feature. And at 99 cents right now you cant go wrong. I went ahead and bought it at that price. Looks like I will have multiple apps for taking notes for different class needs.
 
I've been doing this as well with a mix of stylus/penultimate and Pages. It's just a little to muich extra work for me at the moment. But I'm going to create my own end-all be all course note taking application specifically for university students, you can check out my thread here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1035455/
 
Note-taking with voice recognition and handwriting recognition capabilities?

Hi,

I am in a search for a note-taking app that has voice recognition and handwriting recognition capabilities. I am a student and would like to record my professor's lectures while I take notes on an ipad. Then, transcribe automatically the lecture (here is why voice recognition) and convert my handwriting into regular text (handwriting recognition) so that I have both my professor's explanation and my notes in text. I would then like to transfer this file to my mac air and edit it in word so that I have my whole lecture (speech and my notes) as a *doc file.

Any suggestions on how I can do this or what app/applications to use? I do not own an ipad yet and am weighting the possibility of buying one if it meets my needs (above) or buying a Livescribe Echo instead and install myscript. And then probably install a voice recognition software.

Any thoughts?

Thank you!




Briview said:
I can't believe the strong emphasis on Pages in this thread.

Don't get me wrong. Pages is a lovely and handy word processor that has been developed by the makers of the iPad, but to use for taking notes in lectures... I don't know if I can completely recommend it.

Pages is something you can use for starting, doing, and finishing assignments due in sections/lectures, but isn't convenient to use for lectures itself.

I have plenty of experience with the iPad for notes, as I'm a student in Berkeley and got my iPad upon release (April 3rd) and took it to my very first lecture on day one (Monday, April 5th). Since then, I've been using it for school work and papers. I think that's what Pages is about and best for. Yet no app that I have tested (Wondershare iDraft, Memos, Evernote, SoundPaper HD to name a few) have the strong abilities that are BUILT for in-class/lecture note-taking as Noterize does.

Noterize incorporates the most amount of multitasking and ease.
First of all, in addition to note-taking, you don't have to quit the app and go to a drawing program since there are pen, pencil, sketch tools to add in drawings/diagrams right next to your text. Not to mention labeling, post-its, highlighting text you've typed, changing font size, uploading/adding pics from Photos app, etc.

It records the lecture (through the iPad microphone) and matches the notes typed at a moment with the professor/speaker's speech at the same moment and syncs it for you.

Then, just when you think that's all you need, the UI can flip over with a touch of a button and autosave your file, suddenly showing a Google.com with the address bar... it's a built-in Safari in the app! Surf the web freely... then press that button on the corner and get back to your notes, right where you left off, after you've completed your wikipedia research, in-Safari instant messaging, email check, etc. in the "built-in Safari".

So far, that's the most powerful, and packed note-taking experience I've gotten. Not advertising... just informing. ;)
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

I guess I am the only college student who still uses pen and paper :p
 
antnie said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8H7 Safari/6533.18.5)

I guess I am the only college student who still uses pen and paper :p
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I still do also. It's much easier.
 
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