Note Anytime for iPad for Note Taking and Sketching in Real Time
Note Anytime for iPad is the best free app for Note taking and sketching in real time no matter what your mobile lifestyle demands. It is on iPad, the new Windows 8 Metro and will soon be on Android and iPhone.
There are a lot of note taking apps for iPad, some paid and some free – but there are none that offer the breadth of features as the new Note Anytime for iPad, especially in a free app. Anyone who carries around an iPad knows that one of the best features is its portability: the internet and all your favorite tools are always at your fingertips. So we all need a tool that allows us to use our iPad like it is a tablet. We all need a tool that can mark up and sketch around any content on our iPad just like it was an electronic piece of paper. This is why I like Note Anytime.
Note Anytime is more than just a simple note taker, it is like a whiteboard for all of my digital content. With the "dynamic mashup" feature, I can create a mindmap of notes and drawings around photos from my camera, graphic files from Dropbox, PDF files or even a web page. The cool "floating palette" of tools can be collapsed to give me more white space and I can wrap up my whole "objet d'art" and save it as a jpeg to email or tweet to my friends.
I personally have been having fun writing funny captions on my photos and posting them to Facebook. With the iPad 3, I think many users will appreciate the high resolution of graphics and photos with the "vector based authoring" function. I was working on my website, and used Note Anytime to browse to the site and grab it as a graphic. Then I scratched my notes and changes all over it, added new photos and graphics and sent it out to my webmaster as a final PDF. It was just like marking it up on paper as if my webmaster was in the same room.
I have never found as many cool features for sketching and note taking in a free application. There are paid functions for fancy calligraphy pens, paper layouts and special inks – but the free app offers so many useful features it is quickly becoming one of my favorite new toys.
There are five pen types and a rich color palette that I can modify and customize on the fly. I can also add typed text and move around or rotate the text boxes anywhere I want on the page. I love that I can pick up each piece of my collage and shrink or expand the pieces any way I want. It seems there is limitless white space in Note Anytime, so I can keep creating.
I also love that I can save any piece of my drawing or several as individual graphic items and place them in the item library for reuse later. This is definitely the Back to School tool I will recommend to all of my friends.