Notes Plus 4+

Great app for handwriting but has hiccups

I use this app daily both at work and school. It is the perfect companion for the Ipad with Apple Pencil. It has many pro’s to the handwriting experience and have preferred this app to many others (goodnotes, metamoji, Notes, ect.) Good job building the app.
Nevertheless, I have to bring up the fact that lately the app is losing its credibility. I have had various features that have broken on me. When I got the app, getting files from dropbox was readily available. A while back, I could no longer reach dropbox through the app (had to find an alternative way to import files into the app). I cannot export recordings without having to disable icloud backup when transferring the files to my computer. Recently adding pages to a pdf, corrupts the files and all marks get shifted and messes the whole file. When renaming files, it gets messed up and shuts down. As you may expect, I’ve spent a bit of time having to find alternatives to these problems. I’ve sent request through their help service and have not gotten many responses to my requests. Hopefully this is not a negative trend team.
The app is a great product, but I hope the team gets on the ball with all of these required bug fixes.

Best writing to text app, but lacks in other areas for college

Notes plus is a good app, but it defiantly has some issues. No drag and drop is an issue. As a medical student, I use multiple note apps. One to take all the notes in, and another to condense all the notes. For this I like to copy small parts of diagrams, and place these pictures next to a brief description of the drug or disease. Notability is the only app that I have seen do this. I can paste these pictures into some apps. The lag on Notes plus on pasting more than one picture between apps is 5 minutes. Notes Plus also seems to struggle more with larger documents. Yet I like the smoothness of the writing in this app. The
Handwriting to text is best in Notes Plus. Selecting which pages to import is also nice. Being able to see more pages than notability is nice. The search feature is one of the main reasons notability is the best college app, and the file organization is great. Good notes has one feature I love. Once you select the defect shape feature it is east to quickly highlight and get very straight lines. That feature makes pre-lecture reading a faster process. I like many features of many apps, but none of them are prefect. One feature no app has, but I would like to see is the ability to add several pictures at the same time from photos to a document. Each of these photos would be their own page. This would be of great use for many university students.

Developer Response ,

Hi Idaho1976, thanks a lot for the feedback! We're working on iOS 11's drag and drop for Notes Plus. Expect to have another update in the near future. I've taken notes for all the concerns you wrote up here. We'll surely address those concerns.

Summary: Which app will be the future of notetaking, Notes Plus or Notability?

Pluses: An intuitive tool that allows notes to be taken easily and fluently for both academic and work purposes. Very straightforward and easy to use. The number of tools or well-designed and allows for a smooth note writing experience.

Major Minus: Notability has caught up with Notes Plus, copying many of its features. A few years ago Notes Plus was clearly the better option, that is no longer the case. Notes Plus would clearly be the better application except that Notability now has an incredibly advanced search function, not only can handwritten notes be searched but now PDFs can be searched. Meaning that PDFs can be uploaded, a general search can be completed and it will show which PDFs contain the word, then where in each PDF the word is, this is done by highlighting it. This is a huge advantage because PDFs can simply be uploaded and dropped into this app, terms can then be searched and notes apply to them when need be. In notes plus, PDFs are not searchable and written text is not highlighted when it is searched.

Question: Will Notes Plus be adding more advanced search functions in the near future?