NoteTab for note-taking

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 14, 2012 at 09:37 PM

While I do like Notebooks for iPad/iPod as a note-taker, I think it has some serious limitations as an outliner. While it allows you to create hierarchies of notes by using “books” as folders and “notes” as items in folders, there doesn’t seem to be a way to export and extract such a set of books and notes as a single document. If that were possible, it would be a superb mobile writing tool. (I did suggest this to the developer but this issue seems to be on a back burner somewhere).

One would think that this problem could be overcome by exporting to Dropbox and then by combining the exported text files somehow with another programme. However, if you need to sync between iPod and iPad as I do, it also exports a bunch system files, which muddy the waters. Plus whenever I opened an exported text file, it didn’t have any paragraph breaks or even spaces after the end of lines, turning it into a mass of undifferentiated text that would just take a long time to organise.

Has anyone figured any better way to deal with the exported text files in Dropbox? In the meantime I’m just sticking to emailing individual notes to myself, which is a shame, as exporting an entire directory would be just such a neat way to work on large projects in iPad.