I sat in the Brancacci Chapel here in Florence yesterday typing up some notes on my iPad. Nothing fancy, just a few useful paragraphs. Boy is the thing good for note-taking. Quick, easy, quiet. Even typing on the notebook screen is fine.

Clearly I'm not the only one who thinks the iPad is a great note-taker. There seem to be hundreds of apps for doing notes on the thing. Macintouch gave notice of six new iPad/iPhone apps yesterday -- half of them to do with note-taking.

So what actually works? For me anyway, I can't tell you what will work for you.<!--more-->

I've been messing round with several options to try to find out. <a class="zem_slink" title="Simplenote" rel="homepage" href="http://www.simplenoteapp.com/">SimpleNote</a> is free and, well, simple as the name suggests. It stores notes online and syncs them through a variety of apps for PCs, Macs, iPhones, iPads or Android. Scrivener will sync to SimpleNote too, though not in a way that I find particularly useful frankly (you just see Scrivener text files with a header). If all you want is simple text this seems a pretty useful way to go. Bit rudimentary for dealing with lots of information. I'm undisciplined. I need order.

There are a lot of fancier alternatives. I tried (i.e. bought -- what other option is there?) something called <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/muji-notebook/id397351449?mt=8" target="_blank">Muji Notebook</a> from a Japanese company. Beautifully designed and dead clever when it comes to writing <em>and</em> drawing things like this...

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6247" title="Muji Notebook" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/mzl-yhxypikw-480x480-75-1.jpg" alt="" width="360" height="480" />

You can also annotate existing images and pdfs and export things by email. The handwriting recognition is laughable but it is Japanese I guess. But the gimmickry wore off I'm afraid. Once I had five or six notes they started to get a bit lost.

I also tried something similar called <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noterize/id364906681?mt=8" target="_blank">Noterize</a> which was good and without the gimmicks. But you still get back to that pile of notes trapped on the iPad and shared as individual files. Which isn't so great if you're trying to create a store of notes for use on a Mac or PC, as you can with SimpleNote.

In the end I decided to stick with something I already knew: <a class="zem_slink" title="Evernote" rel="homepage" href="http://www.evernote.com">Evernote</a>. This is a service I've been using for a couple of years. It stores text, images and pdfs on the web and then shares them out through a variety of apps, on PCs, Macs, iPhones and Android phones. The interface for Mac and Windows is a bit clunky but the thing works. Keeping notes there means I get to see those I've collected for the project as a whole too -- not just things I've created on the iPad. You can do that with SimpleNote of course, but only for text. With Evernote you get more as this screenshot shows...

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-6248" title="Evernote" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/ipad-landscape-notebooks3.png" alt="" width="490" height="341" />

You can do fancy stuff, such as putting in your location. But I don't need that frankly. Just words and pictures. And there is one huge gotcha which applies to the iPad as a whole. You can read all your Evernote entries easily but if you try to edit one that has text formatting you get this message (I had to email that screenshot to myself -- can you believe that?)

<img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-6249" title="Evernote rich text" src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/ipad.png?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="253" />

At least Evernote have a workaround. But this loathing of the iPad for rich text is a bit ridiculous frankly. Apple seem to enable it for their own apps like the hopeless word processor Pages. But they don't allow anyone else into the club easily. I hope that gets fixed.

Still Evernote works, very well indeed, so I'll be placing my notes in there and syncing them back to the web when I get back to the apartment at the end of the day. It makes the iPad a very neat information collection tool. Not the toy it seemed at first at all. I still can't revise on it or write more than chunks. But at least it's got some uses beyond the frivolous.

PS. I just came back from the Pitti Palace where it was impossible to sit down with the iPad and make notes. So I did it on the Evernote app on my Android phone instead -- which has the added benefit of having a camera which works with the app. So did some scribbles, took some photos, came back to the apartment and they uploaded straight away, appearing in Evernote on my laptop in seconds.

Some more good news... I was instantly alerted to the fact there was a new Android Evernote app waiting for -- version two. Which is a lot better than version one. Definitely my chosen note regime from now on, iPad or phone.