New Ipad, what apps to put on it?

Posted by MadaboutDana
Dec 12, 2012 at 02:57 PM

OneNote on iPad is pretty good, actually. Not as good as the original, but it does allow you to maintain the basics, and has a fairly good search function.

OneNote+ is very good indeed, but has a couple of weaknesses: it doesn’t support checkbox lists (unlike Microsoft’s client), and although it allows you to type anywhere on the page, it doesn’t support outlines either (indented lists yes, actual folding outlines no). On the other hand the developers are frightfully enthusiastic and it’s in regular development.

A pure iPad equivalent is the very good, very powerful Notability, which supports text boxes, sketching, diagrams, and all kinds of other stuff. But it has no direct desktop equivalent (it can output in many different formats, mind you). It’s the closest thing to a “native” OneNote for iOS, in my view. A rather simpler but also satisfyingly powerful option is ableNote.

Other super-powerful notebooks it’s worth mentioning are Circus Pony Notebooks (powerful but mildly annoying), Taposé (based on a Microsoft project that never happened) and Notebooks (mentioned in various threads in this forum). CPN and Notebooks both have desktop clients (CPN for Mac only, Notebooks for Mac and PC).

Finally, in view of this forum’s outliner focus, it’s worth mentioning OmniOutliner (very powerful rich text outliner with Mac desktop client - quite expensive, though) and Cotton Notes (very rapidly evolving outliner that has only recently been launched, but is already looking very interesting). Both are one-pane outliners.

If you’re into TiddlyWiki, you might like to try TiddlyNotes (excellent German product) or TWMobile (also excellent, and allows you to import/export tiddlywikis to your heart’s content).

Otherwise I strongly recommend Blogsy for blogs (I use a WordPress blog), Catch for online notes that can be synchronised between any number of platforms, and ReaddleDocs for managing files in various cloud-based repositories and on your iPad: a true golden oldie, and better than many more recent apps. Oh, and Readdle also produce the definitive PDF editor/annotator, PDF Expert, which is one of the App Store’s most popular apps.

Cheers,
Bill