Notability: Notes, PDF for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By BibleUser123

  Overall, A Really great app

  Something that I really liked about notability was the simple and intuitive layout. This made it really easy for me to organize my notes and help me maintain order with my notes. Another thing that I really liked was all of the new updates that really helped with making things run more smoothly (i.e. the favorites bar, being able to search for key words within the notes themselves instead of just the title, and the magnifying glass). Some areas of improvement would be being able to adjust the shape of the magnifying box because there are sometimes when I’m trying to edit a specific place and the magnifying box just doesn’t fit right. Another thing would be to be able to open more than two notes at once. This would come in handy for those to do notes simultaneously on multiple sections. It would also be cool if when your in portrait mode for the notes you have the option to be able to stack the notes top of one another instead of seeing them side. Then one last area of adjustment would be to be able to have a bookmarked notes bar like how there is a bookmarked pages (within each notes) bar. It would make jumping between two desired note documents a little bit easier. Anyways, that’s it from me. Thank you for making a really great app. Totally looking foreword to what’s in store for the future of this app.

  
  
• By Eddy2050

  Best Invention Ever - Student Perspective

  I’m a computer science student graduating in August 2020. Notability has been incredibly helpful as a work tool for school. I bought myself an iPad as a freshman in university. I also bought Notability to take notes. Not having to worry about carrying notebooks and losing papers has been an enormous help. All my notes are taken and saved in notability. I have an entire 4 years of university on this app. The synchronized recording with pen note taking has been the single most helpful thing for me. In some of my toughest computer science courses I would record the lecture (with audio built in on the Notability app) and when I was confused (because I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the lecture) I would go back and listen to the audio and know exactly where the confusion occurred because the writing was synchronized with the location in the audio. I’ve tried multiple note-taking apps (paid ones too) and this is by far my favorite. Thank you Notability team! One thing I would appreciate is a better file management system. Having four years worth of work on my notability app makes file management essential and the current file management could be improved!

  
  
• By j micah

  Great university study tool with a couple issues

  I was using OneNote on a Surface tablet until the digitizer stopped working. I decided to try using an iPad Pro instead, since they’re lighter. Notability was the only app to offer most of the same functionality as OneNote on a Windows tablet. There are many things that I prefer about Notability, but there are a few issues that prevent me from giving it more stars: first, I would like the ability to create a group of commonly used highlighters/pens for marking up documents. I have a system of using certain colors to represent certain things, and I would like to be able to organize all those highlighters and pens into a group where I determine the order and placement. If that is possible in Notability, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Secondly, I use Notability in a setting where I’m regularly working with several languages (including RTL - Right to Left languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic). Notability does not have good support for combining multiple languages in one document at this time, especially not mixed English-Hebrew or English-Aramaic. Please give Notability the ability to recognize and format RTL languages. I can do that natively on most Microsoft apps, and many 3rd party apps, so the inability to do that on Notability really sticks out. Please improve these issues, and I will gladly give it a 5 star rating. In fact, if those two issues are fixed, I won’t even miss using OneNote for most of my coursework.

  
  
• By kmc121084

  Needs better organization

  This app is very helpful, especially the feature to record lectures. I can stay on top of what my professor says easier, and use the Microsoft Pencil to highlight or emphasize certain points. There is a bit of a delay for the notes and the audio, so when I click on a note, I know to automatically hit the “rewind 10 seconds” button, but I just deal with it because it is so helpful regardless. However, while the recording ability is the star feature of this app, the other features need improvement. 1. Since more classes are taking place online due to the pandemic, there should be an option to record lectures using the iPad’s internal microphone. Right now, I play the lectures on my phone and record audio with the iPad, since I do not have a better option. 2. Second, and my biggest gripe with the app is ORGANIZATION. Although you can have subjects, and place notes in the subjects, I want the ability to make folders within the subjects. A lot of my subjects in school are so complex - with labs and assignments in addition to lecture notes and different subtopics, the ability to make folders within subjects is seriously ESSENTIAL. The most I can do is change the name at the beginning of the file to reflect what kind of material it is (ex: Lab 1, Assignemnt 2, etc.) but the ability to make folders really holds this app behind. I still use it for the recording feature, but the lack of organizational options available is really frustrating.

  
  
• By K1lluhk4m

  I’m using it! ☝🏾

  I love the app it is almost everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m very happy with the usability of it in comparison to other note taking apps. I’m not a fan of the subscription model I would rather pay an obscene price one time instead of having an app potentially affect me in the future. My advice is to throw in a lifetime deal for like $50. People could complain but at least they’d have the option. Two features that I would love to see come to the app is to be able to pin audio to a page visually, with a play button and a slider. I use this app for creating story boards and if I can have audio cue in correlation to my my scene breakdowns; I would make more practical use of the audio player. The second feature that I would like to see, is a lasso tool for images. Or an eraser for images. when I create a scene I want to be able to take a picture of my scenes and props and arrange them within the app. The Microsoft Pencil support is BEAUTIFUL! It would be nice to get some smudging features and paint for it. I would like the option to highlight over pictures as well so I’m able to simulate lighting on my subjects. GIF’s. This is definitely more than two things 😅 but currently AS IS Notability is a complete product is worthy of its asking price. However I feel that if those few tweaks were added it would be worth even more and it wouldn’t be debated.

  
  

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