iPhone App: Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker
= 5 stars
Simple note-taking / drawing program for the iPhone.
The Good
- Taking notes with this app has one unique and near genius twist: Instead of creating lines exactly where your finger touches the screen, your scribblings are reduced in size. Your finger draws lines in light, transparent red, but the actual note appears in the background using thinner, black ink. This means writing more freely and quickly, using big strokes. The area of the note currently being editing is framed within a dotted blue line.
- An “auto advance” feature: When your scribblings reach the right screen edge, a large grey rectangle appears on the left. Start scribbling there, and the aforementioned blue rectangle jumps ahead. This means continuous scribbling without concern for creating a new line.
- Several useful, well-thought out buttons: undo / redo buttons that erase or restore all the note’s strokes, arrows to position the dotted blue rectangle, a pencil button to increases the blue rectangle’s size, and an eraser for either red or black ink.
- A share button lets you email a note, save it to your camera roll, or call up a “transcribe” window in which you have access to the iPhone keyboard to transcribe your note into copy and pasteable text, or type directly into a new contact.
- Dan Bricklin’s tutorial video essentially explains everything (and convinced me to purchase this app):
The Bad
- Makes little sense for anyone satisfied with the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard.
- Could use stand some improvement to the transcribe area, namely a save option to the iPhone Notes program, or Newton-style hand writing recognition.
- Could use an import photo feature, for scribbling on photographs in your camera roll.
Conclusion
Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker isn’t perfect, and I waffled between four and five stars, but I’m going with the maximum rating because of one big thing: utility. This is a first version of a productivity tool, one that tries to solve a specific problem using multitouch technology particular to the iPhone. The iPhone platform needs more elegantly ambitious and well-thought out apps like this one.