Notability: Smarter AI Notes

I’m using notability post nursing school to help me study for my NCLEX. I also just got an iPad recently too. I wanted to make my studying easy and accessible anywhere. Whether on the bus or waiting for someone. Notability is very simple to use so if you are like me and like something that is basic and simple then this is the app ! I read some negative comments but got it anyways and I’m glad I did. I am able to put some study books on the app as well as other pdf books. It’s easy to pass notes via airdrop from my other devices and share documents on my iPhone etc if I want my iPad notes on there. If I don’t- it’s like a clean slate on my iPhone notability. I can have 2 different sets of notes basically if I want more business or personal related goal notes on my phone rather than all my iPad notes. So if you are in school- this is very simple, easy, and legit way to use notes. I even have a digital planner on it too which is amazing. I feel more inspired to be creative and do my goals for the day. If you have a keyboard you can type your notes Incase you don’t want to write but I love to highlight, mark notes, and bookmark certain pages to make it easier to find. I do use the split screen option at times but depends on your study preferences. I like to read first, study, then create a note and hand write my notes to make sure I got the info down.

Writing a review of Notability is hard. On the one hand, I use it every single day on my iPad. I do a lot of reading/research for my job, so Notability has saved me from being buried under an endless pile of paper. I even pair it up with Scanbot so I can quickly scan materials in meetings and then have all my notes/handouts in a single place. Being able to search my handwriting is a game-changer! So is having access to my documents and notes everywhere, including my laptop, and having all changes and edits synced through iCloud. I’ve always wanted to go paperless with ubiquitous access to everything; Notability is my hub for that. Which brings me to my chief complaint about Notability: it’s iPhone app is terrible. It’s nice to see my notes on my phone if I need to skim something quickly on the go, but basic functionality is missing. You can’t search a document, highlight pages, see all the pages in a document—if you’re looking for something, you can only scroll until you find it. That’s ok if you’re talking about two pages of notes; but if you are looking at a 50 page journal article trying to find something, it’s ridiculous. Competitors have this functionality on iPhones, but Notability has never added it. I wish they would! I also wish they would format text-only notes like Google Docs, adjusting text size for a given display without affecting the formatting.

I’ve been using this app for years, and appreciate all the updates that have occurred since then. This app has sufficed all my note taking needs, in and out of the classroom. One feature I would like to see is the ability to rename recordings, and possibly to attach these recordings to individual pages. One thing I’ve tried doing this semester is have the recording function on while at a lecture, but having numerous recordings in a file that grows daily is difficult with the current set up. If you don’t remember the time stamp or recording number for a particular point, you have to guess and listen for a bit to see if it’s right. It’s either that, or guess based on the date the notes were recorded. If you could at least rename the audio files, the app would be more useful. It would also be nice if you could change the paper style of individual pages, as well as a feature that easily allows you to draw geometric shapes (adding a figure on top of a graph sticky or any other element get tricky when you click on the wrong one. Sometimes because of that, the graph background ends up on top, and the figure behind it, rendering it useless). There aren’t really any visible bugs with this version of the app, Would recommend for someone looking for a suitable note taking app, whether it’s handwritten or type. I think the addition of a few features would make it better.

I was using OneNote on a Surface tablet until the digitizer stopped working. I decided to try using an iPad Pro instead, since they’re lighter. Notability was the only app to offer most of the same functionality as OneNote on a Windows tablet. There are many things that I prefer about Notability, but there are a few issues that prevent me from giving it more stars: first, I would like the ability to create a group of commonly used highlighters/pens for marking up documents. I have a system of using certain colors to represent certain things, and I would like to be able to organize all those highlighters and pens into a group where I determine the order and placement. If that is possible in Notability, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Secondly, I use Notability in a setting where I’m regularly working with several languages (including RTL - Right to Left languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic). Notability does not have good support for combining multiple languages in one document at this time, especially not mixed English-Hebrew or English-Aramaic. Please give Notability the ability to recognize and format RTL languages. I can do that natively on most Apple apps, and many 3rd party apps, so the inability to do that on Notability really sticks out. Please improve these issues, and I will gladly give it a 5 star rating. In fact, if those two issues are fixed, I won’t even miss using OneNote for most of my coursework.

I can attest to the comments regarding the palm rejection issues after the recent update. Since the update, anytime I attempt to take class notes with the Apple Pencil results in erratic screen behavior. It will zoom in or out randomly, delete the last portion of what is written, or the screen will shift/shake. This only occurs when I am trying to write and my palm is resting on the lower portion of the screen. I have had some previous issues with palm rejection, mainly with the shifting of the screen or zoom but it has been manageable up until this update. It has become basically unusable for me in terms of handwriting since the recent update and the handwriting feature is nearly the sole purpose for purchasing the app in my case. I’ve basically had to resort to other apps for note taking because this has become nearly impossible to write on (unless I write without my palm on the screen and that is definitely not an alternative for me). After reading the previous comments, I have already performed a hard reset of my iPad (an iPad Pro 11” on iOS 12.3), turned off the palm rejection feature in Notability and turned it back on, and finally uninstalled the app completely then reinstalled. None of these attempts have rendered any improvement. Hopefully this is something that can be investigated by the developer and corrected quickly as this has been my preferred app for note taking.