

But if you rotate a PDF in something like PDF Expert or resize a photo in a Pixelmator before sending either to Notebooks, you won’t miss that functionality in Notebooks. That can be frustrating if you want to work exclusively inside Notebooks. For instance, there is no way to rotate an imported PDF and no fine-grained resizing option for photos. The downside of trying to do so much in one app is that it falls short of single-purpose apps. Typically, I just throw webpages, screenshots and notes into Notebooks and refer back to them later, which works equally well on both platforms with the one caveat being that there is no share sheet support on OS X.
Qownnotes review for mac#
While I would like to see the feature set of Notebooks for Mac brought in line with the iOS version, it hasn’t been a deal-breaker for me, but that’s because I don’t feel the need for editing tools in this sort of app very often. The changes you make in a separate app will be reflected in the item stored in Notebooks. If you want to mark up a PDF or alter an image, you can double click the item in Notebooks to open it in the default app for that file type and edit it there. Notebooks for Mac does not have PDF or drawing tools. For any task, you can also set due dates, alarms, and assign tags. When you do so, an indicator will appear in the notebook view that shows how many tasks are contained in that document. Tasks can also be added to individual documents themselves. Why would a document be a task? But when you think about it, having a way to mark off documents that you have finished reviewing for a project or writing is a good way of tracking your progress. Documents in a Notebooks can be transformed into tasks by tapping the info button in the toolbar. Notebooks also includes a surprisingly full-featured task manager. In both cases, when you are finished, you can tap the ‘Process’ button to convert your text to several formats, including plain text, Markdown, PDF, or an eBook. The formatted documents you create are HTML under the hood, which allows Notebooks to convert text documents to and from Markdown, though certain formatting will show up in a Markdown document as HTML if there is no Markdown syntax for it. If you prefer to write with formatted text, Notebooks adds an extra row of buttons above the keyboard with over twenty formatting options. People who work on iOS will love the power of Notebooks on the Mac, Notebooks is closer to a viewer app and may not be sufficient to meet your needs.

Whether Notebooks is right for you will depend on the extent to which you want to edit files stored in it and, if so, whether iOS or OS X is the dominant platform you use. The more recently released Mac version of Notebooks, however, doesn’t go much beyond text editing, which is a little disappointing. Notebooks for iOS strikes a nice balance with excellent text and PDF editing tools. Notebooks’ editing tools are a different story. With solid search, sorting and sync options, your notebooks and documents are always readily available to you, which makes it a great research tool, especially on iOS. Notebooks by Alfons Schmid is an iOS and Mac notebook app that has excellent organizational tools on iOS and the Mac. Go too light, and the editing features aren’t of much use. Good organizational tools like search, sorting, and sync are a must, but apps that go too deep into editing features can quickly become a bloated mess. The difficulty, though, is balancing organizational functionality with editing tools. Media-rich research projects and reference materials benefit from the familiar metaphor of a notebook as a way to organize everything in one place. There’s a reason why there have been so many different notebook-style apps on iOS and the Mac over the years.
