PinkElephant

Goodnotes 5 (started with GN4, and upgraded early this year). No EN sync available, but I like the design, the handling and the very good search in the handwritten notes. It is possible to send pages (pick some of them and put them in one file) as pdf to EN to file it there. From my experience when picking an app, it is worth testing the preselected top 3 (even if it means paying) and find the one that you like. All the tests and stuff in YouTube / blogs will not tell you whether you really like it or not. And it is better to stick with one app, than hopping from one to the other. Switching apps will end in a maze of „with which app did I take this note / lesson / content / .... ? “. Hint: If you pick one of the front runners, you have a good chance it will still be there in 3, 5 or even 10 years. I have decided to go with EN and Goodnotes, and this is it. Others have decided for other products, for good reason as well. Just go and find out.

With the app „Office lens“ (Microsoft, free on the AppStore) beside other functions it is possible to open any picture from the camera roll of an iPhone or iPad. It can then be manually corrected to a frontal perspective by picking the edges, and saved back to the camera roll. There seems to be no automatic perspective correction, that exists if the picture is taken directly with Office Lens using the devices camera. Once there is the collection of the corrected pictures, use an app to create a pdf from them (in my case PDF Expert from readdle).

My personal solution is GoodNotes, ver. 5. Version 4 is still available, but the coding resources go into ver. 5. Handwriting and overall functionality is very good, and I like the feel-and-touch. It has the ability to search for text in all the handwritten notes / pages created, for all notebooks. This is within the App. Because they save variations of any word not clearly legible, they usually even find text where the handwriting was a bit off. A deficit is that the new version just syncs into iCloud, nothing else. They have promised to add other services, but up to now one must export to a pdf and import this into EN to add anything to the database.

Just gave Penultimate another try. If you are used to some solid note taking with Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, the app is an outdated joke. Personally I use Goodnotes for all handwritten stuff, but I hear a lot of good things about Notability as well. If I need some of it in EN, I have to export it as a pdf and send it via share as a note to EN. EN for me is far away from being a serious contender in the race for taking handwritten notes. Make a few quick annotations, fine. But not taking notes ! Every bug report on this is justified !

Hello, same setup on the iPhone regarding iOS and App version, except I am still using my 6S+/128. This is 2 processor generations older than the iPhone 8, and even more dated than the XS mentioned above. No lagging, except when it needs to download anything while on mobile. I am not typing with my thumbs, but even when maxing it out on a try with my fingers, no lagging at all. To make this clear, I do not say you guys are wrong, and I am right. We are discussing our very personal user experience, so I just want to understand what may make a difference. iOS for me is not to blame. The recent generations got faster and more responsive. My piece of hardware is aging, but got faster with each new iOS. The SW-engineers did a very nice job on this, especially when counting the additional features build into the code. And I have gotten a new battery last november, which boosted endurance (better than new !). What may influence things: I am switching off about once a week. This helps by cleaning out the memory and sets all apps back to zero. With the EN-app, my experience only goes back a few month. I use the iOS app on the iPad Pro 10,5/512 and my iPhone, plus the windows client with Win 10 on a PC with a core i7 build in 2012, a SSD/512 installed 3 years later as boot drive, and a standard Scansnap ix500 to feed paper directly into EN. No software problems at all, so far, performance is good on all ends. My issues with the EN apps concern workflow aspects, and the difference in functionality between the windows and the iOS versions.

Hello guys, I follow this thread with total amazement about the wonders of the IT world. But one simple question: What for ? If I own the device, I install the EN client, and call it a day. If not, I go through the web portal, if need be in private mode. Or I use the mobile devices we all (?) carry around all day long, knowing that the Apps for iOS or Android are not completely up to the windows App. But at least I have a working solution that will work even after the next update, and not compromise my data. So I have not understood the use case behind all this non-registry-mobile-take-along-stuff. But if there is something I miss, I would be happy to learn.

Hello, David, I do understand the frustration. However, this post is weak on the facts: Device, iOS status, build of browser, sample of pdf tried to clip (link to the page) etc. I am using the iOS workflow quite intensely and have up to now not encountered problems like this (knock on wood ...). If I had, I would be frustrated as well !

Just a word of caution in this very technical thread: The discussion about „use this client, avoid that platform“ means that every metastructure created client-specific will be worst case useless when opened with another client. Good examples are the mobile versions as EN-Apps. They will not show the tag-superstructure, as if it did not exist. From my point of view the fundamental structure of my Evernote „heap of information“ should be accessible from any client. Even if today I would work PC (or Mac) - only: Who tells it will still be like this a year ahead ? If I rely on a structure that is bound to a specific client, chances are that all of my work to structure and group will be for nothing sometime in the future. Maybe it would be more flexible to project the desired hierarchy into a sort of numbering code that goes right into the header or top of the body of the note, and use the tags in a more general way of building a primary search instrument. If it is placed in the header, the ability of EN to build a summary note with an index / table of content from and for a large number of notes would allow to produce an index to search, find and the jump via hyperlink to each note related to a searchable set of notes. The same note can show in x different summary notes, the links always lead to the same physical / logical note as container of the information. From my understanding of the EN database concept, a deep rigid structure runs contrary to its basic design.

Some weeks ago I started to get newbie-notifications from EN as well. A while later it stopped. Maybe in headquarters the new intern was moved along from marketing to accounting 😉

iPad Pro 10,5 / 512GB / WiFi+LTE, iOS and all apps updated Just as a feedback: No problems at all ... EN app runs stable and responsive. Small lag (hardly noticeable) when syncing to load a note with a larger attachment, data is not local. Shut down the iPad completely, restart ? Uninstall & reinstall the app ?

In many discussions notebooks and tags are viewed as contradicting concepts. I want to share a view where within a workflow they are fluent, notes moving from a tag to a notebook back to a tagging-dominated perspective. My wife and I love to travel on our own. This means collecting many ideas about where to go, what to do, where to stay, what to eat etc. We have started to collect these snippets in a EN notebook “Travel ideas”, with some very basic tags. These are not related to the content, but only to find these nuggets in the database. All in one notebook, access through tags. When a travel plan gets more solid, I create a new notebook labeled with the destination and the year. There we collect everything related to this project. Here the notebook is the main criteria for holding things together. Tags move with the notes from “ideas” but are secondary, more notes join them (Tickets, Documents, Bookings and the like). Why a notebook ? Because it is easy to define a notebook with all its content as “offline”. When traveling it is always a good idea to carry everything along on the mobile devices. So we share this Notebook, and have things available wherever we are, no matter WiFi and roaming. While on the trip, more goes into the notebook, often scanned on the fly. Wherever there is a internet connection, it syncs to “home” and between the offline copies. Now we are back. Delete everything ? No, because it is there, contains memories, helps in sorting through the picture roll etc. But I do not want to have it hanging around as yet another notebook any more. Solution: I create a Tag named ZZZ_Destination_Year. ZZZ to move it to the end of the list (=tag archive), the rest is the selection criteria. Then I select all notes in the travel project notebook and assign them the new tag. This done, I move them all to a notebook “Travel Archive”, and delete the now obsolete project notebook. For us it works and took a lot of stress out of travel preparation and execution - because every information is always going to one place, nearly always available. Even when we are happy as it is, we are open to ideas to improve this further. The concept can of course be transferred to all processes that run through a planning-execution-followup-archive-cycle.

The planet is spinning, the wheels are grinding .... Compared to other ages, we live in the best of all worlds.

... yourself a favor: Get the right glasses ! Let me tell you my story: With age the eye will adapt less to watching things in different distances. So I have gotten myself variofocal glasses. And a stiff neck and strong headache, when working a lot in front of a screen. Why ? Because the area needed for the screen distance is placed low on the glass. To see a sharp image I had to raise my head, which created stress to the neck. Whenever I worked long hours like that, everything stiffend up and gave me all sort of trouble. Little exercises to loosen things up helped, but not for long. Then I got myself new variofocal glasses, just for the screen work. They are not set to „infinite“ on the far end, but to about 3-4 m, and the low end is document viewing distance. When I look at the screen, the head has a natural angle now, and the stiffness and sore is gone. They make good reading glasses, too.

My solution for scanning on my i-devices is ScannerPro by readdle. It is fast, reliable even under low light conditions etc. The best feature is the possibility to create own workflows, without coding. I have created several workflows related to repetitive scanning & importing tasks. They take the scan (can be set to jpeg or pdf), tag it with a set of standard tags assigned to the workflow (like ScannerPro, 2019, Music, Events) and import it as a new note to the designated Evernote-Notebook. Often this is it - the note is there, tagged and available to search and retrieval without further effort.