Notability: A cheaper alternative to Apple's Pages
Recommend
Notability, a recently updated app for iPad, can best be described as a cross between a multimedia notepad -- allowing you to type, draw, speak and copy photos and Web links onto a digital canvas -- and a powerful word processor, like Apple's Pages, that lets you type up longer-form pieces, such as essays, work reports or blog entries.
While not perfect, the app delivers a lot of bang for not a lot of buck.
More so than other note-taking apps for iPad (such as Notepad+), Notability is a versatile tool for capturing thoughts and ideas, creating content or copying media from various sources -- all in an accessible way.
Open up a new or existing note, and you can pull up the virtual keyboard to type out notes -- and select the font type, size and color -- plus, you can easily copy, cut and paste, as well as underline, italicize or bold words. Too bad there's no spell-checker or word-count tool, though.
Alternatively, use your fingertip to draw on the screen as you would with a pen on a napkin — and you can adjust the pen size, color and transparency, too. You can also select from various shapes, and after laying them down on the screen, adjust their size to suit your needs.
If you need to record audio -- be it an idea while you're on an airplane, during a business meeting or perhaps to archive a professor's lecture -- you can tap the Record button to add audio to the note, as well. You'll know if your note has audio in it because of a small red dot beside the name of the note on the summary screen, along with the date and time created.
Notability also lets you insert a picture from your camera roll or photo library; adjust the size of the photo on the white backdrop; and if you like, crop it, add a caption or draw on the photo. Browsing the Web and see an article or Web page that's relevant to one of your notes? Simply select "Insert Web Clip," and you can link to a desired URL (including support for bookmarks).
Perhaps a future version of Notability will support video, too, so you can drag and drop video clips into a note just as easy as you can audio, photos, websites or hand-drawn illustrations.
Once you have a few notes created, they can be grouped by subject or organized by name or date. It doesn't have color-coded backgrounds as Notepad+ does, but you can easily search by keyword if you can't find what you're looking for by browsing.
I also wish Notability had alarms you can set to remind you of things -- or the ability to export a note to your calendar, perhaps for use in a business meeting. But at least there's no shortage of ways to back up and share your notes -- this includes e-mail (as PDF, RTF or Notability file), wireless printing, exporting to iTunes or using "cloud" solutions such as Dropbox or iDisk or via WebDav server.
For less than $1, Notability has a lot going for it -- especially for those who don't want to spend the $10 for Apple's Pages.
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