Review: Note Taker -- handwrite notes on your iPhone

Lots of apps allow you to jot down a note on your iPhone, but the text is typically entered by using the virtual keyboard.  Note Taker is an app that allows you to jot down notes by using your handwriting — or perhaps I should say your fingerwriting.  The app allows you to create a blank page of notes, each page being approximately the size of an index card.  You use your finger to draw letters in red ink on the full screen, and then whatever you write appears in black text on the card as a whole.  This way, you can use the entire screen as a writing surface, but then what you have drawn only takes up a small part of the screen.  It's a pretty ingenious system.

 

 

It's a little hard to describe the process for writing notes, but this video shows you how it is done:

Buttons at the bottom of the screen let you move the blue box (which is the part of the card where what you write will appear), change to a larger or smaller pencil to draw on more on the card at once, erase using an eraser and delete the last letter that you wrote.  And you can tap the button at the bottom left to make all of the writing area disappear so that you can just see what you wrote.

 

The app keeps tracks of all of your notes and lets you name them or tag them.  When you are finished with a note you can e-mail it or save it to your Photos on the iPhone.

 

This is a really neat app but, for me at least, it doesn't seem very useful.  I find that it is much slower to write text using my finger than it is to just type on the iPhone virtual keyboard, and thus I cannot see ever wanting to write out a note using this app instead of any of the countless apps that have a virtual keyboard such as the iPhone's built-in Notes app.  But fortunately, the developer offers a free lite version (which is the version that I tried) that lets you create up to four notes, and then if you find the lite app useful you can upgrade to the full version which costs only $1.99.

One interesting tidbit about this app:  it was developed by Dan Bricklin.  In 1979, Bricklin was the co-creator of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for a personal computer.  For a time in the early 1980s, VisiCalc was the #1 reason for many business to get a computer in the first place.  One might argue that the Apple II, and thus Apple itself, would not have been an early success but for VisiCalc.  There are not many iPhone app developers who can say that they also wrote software for the Apple II, and none who can say that they wrote software nearly as important.  Bricklin's Note Taker app will not have the same impact on the iPhone as VisiCalc did on the Apple II, but it is great to see Bricklin still writing innovative software for Apple's products over 30 years later.

If you think that you might enjoy the ability to write out, instead of type out, your notes, try the lite version and see what you think.

Click here for Note Taker Lite (free): 

Click here for Note Taker ($1.99):