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):
Jeff, I like how you don’t pull your punch on this review, but then come back round for some context and history on Dan Bricklin. Really enjoying your blog; you’ve got this down.
I would like to take hand written notes on my iPod touch to put it to so some more good use. I am wondering what is the best stylus for the iPod touch/Iphone. I did download the program called “Dan Bricklands note taker” and it works really well with my finger but would be better and faster with a stylus. Thanks everybody for your help :o)
Thanks for turning me on to this app. It provides a neat companion to Evernote. After going through the on-screen tutorial, I hand wrote some notes and e-mailed them to my Evernote e-mail address. Not only does this put the note in my Evernote database, keeping all my notes in a central, searchable repository, but Evernote also indexes the handwriting. I would love to see Evernote buy this app and integrate it into its note-taking app to give you another input option.
While I agree with you that I would rarely use it for day to day note taking, as I’m faster with the thumb-pad entry, there are many people who would find this a more convenient way to enter notes.
I did briefly consider whether I could use it in situations where I still use handwritten notes: during in-person meetings. When meeting with someone, there is no polite way to take notes with an iPhone. With paper, I can write while keeping eye contact. Unfortunately, a tool like Note Taker doesn’t replace my Moleskine notebooks and legal pads as you can’t easily take notes without looking at the device constantly (not to mention autoshutoff / battery issue).