Here’s what’s great about Pear Note on iOS:
I really appreciate not having the sound of my typing be so prevalent when taking notes. That alone might be worth the price of entry alone, which is a reasonable $4.99 on the App Store.
The extra toolbar that sits above the keyboard is genius. In Kathleen’s initial review of the iPad back in June 2010, she mentioned wishing that there were arrow keys to move the cursor about the screen. Pear Note went ahead and did it. They work beautifully, as do the options to create bullets, numbered lists, bold and italics, highlighting, and indentations. I’m honestly not sure why this approach hasn’t been used in many other apps. This is how Apple should have made its keyboard.
It syncs easily with Dropbox (https://docsbay.net/dropbox-quick-start), a tool we love around here. Since the iOS app is universal, it means my notes show up on all of my devices at once. What’s more, I can easily open them on my desktop version and vice versa. Setting up the sync is two-click simple, and it just works from there on out.
While the app is primarily designed to deal with text, you can also include pictures (from your library or that you take with the device’s camera) or paste in images that you create in other apps.
You can switch to different apps and Pear Note will continue to record audio in the background.
And here are a few disappointments:
First, I can’t ever imagine taking notes on my phone. While it works just as well as on the iPad, the typing surface is just too small. Still, I applaud Pear Note for being a universal app as others may find they feel differently.
On Pear Note’s desktop software, you can record video. That’s always felt a bit strange since you will most likely use your computer’s built-in camera, and thus be recording video of yourself. But the option is there. The iOS version won’t let you take video at all. That being said, video recorded on the desktop version plays fine on iOS once it’s been synced.
The desktop version of Pear Note also allows you to easily create HTML version of your notes so you can share them with others. There’s no option for this in the iOS app. Sure, you can push it to the desktop version, but that means buying an extra piece of software.
While these are perhaps small disappointments, I’ve also found that while I can type more silently on my iPad than on my laptop, I almost always prefer the laptop because I’ve got a keyboard that I can easily touch-type on. So while the iOS version solves the problem I was looking for, it turns out that it wasn’t as much a problem as I thought it was in the end.