Notate Reviews
4/5 rating based on 5 reviews. Read all reviews for Notate for iPhone.
Notate is free iOS app published by Shafer Systems LLC
Cool app - I was wrong about nearly everything I thought
Knightrid
I’m a subscriber who originally got this app for iPad Pro and pencil support. I’m still a little inexperienced at the app. My biggest investment in a note program has been in OneNote because of work and the ability to sync on work accounts and personal accounts within the same interface. Plus the ability to share with a team. I have years of notes and college notes from classes. This is a great app and worth trying, then subscribing to. It’s much cheaper than Evernote which I abandoned long ago. From my last few minutes of research there’s a bunch I didn’t know about this app and I was going to suggest several enhancements that happen to already be in the product. I am the type to read a manual, but I didn’t even know there was one. I’ll take some of the blame for that. It’s a big investment of time for someone to switch solutions. I really just wanted the pen support, but while writing and researching my points for the review I just convinced myself this app has more to offer than I realized. It’s great that the publisher has a OS X, iOS, MobileIron, Airwatch, Citrix, and even Blackberry version. I visited the website and I didn’t think they had a Windows version because it’s not listed on the main page when I visit on my phone. I just found a download link that proves me wrong. But it probably would be good to make that more clear because I only saw the apps listed above at first for some reason... that was when tapping “Select the version that fits you”. Windows support was another thing I was gonna request and be wrong about. :) I was going to say that it would be nice to import from OneNote and other programs, but that would be a nightmare to automate. Now that I know there is an OS X version and Windows version I can just transfer my notes on a larger device. Something else I came across was a matrix of what your solution can do versus others. But it’s filed under Blackberry in your support site. Just saying you might make it more easy to prominent/easy to find The interface is great, intuitive, and well designed for a multitude of device form factors. It is organized a bit different than OneNote, but for a messy note taker like me who just wants to get the information documented or idea outlined with little fuss, it’s great and probably encourages me to start better note taking habits. I was going to make a comment about not being able to create styles/templates, but I found it on your support site under FAQ. It’s cool that the apps help icon/button goes to the iOS section, but then you have good tips under FAQs that people would have to go to the main site, I would either make FAQs available on the iOS help or better yet have a filtered FAQs with just the relevant content sorted by frequency/popularity down the road if the list gets longer. By the way the privacy policy link for this app on the iPhone App Store leads to a 404 error. Just saying... Also, I have one minor problem, on iPhone, which is that when I switch views or pinch to zoom in/out, the title of the note and text of the note can sometimes overlap. I just readjust the zoom with a pinch movement and it is ok again, just a glitch and not a huge deal. iOS version is current. So my lesson learned from this review and the many points I nearly made incorrectly is that this is not just an amazing product that does everything I want, but it has some cool enterprise features. The MDM integration has a lot of value. Also, read the manual of you are serious about switching or making this your main note app.
Dissapointed
Jemilove
I’ve been trying to find a way to communicate with the developer and there is no was of doing that. I am very disappointed with this app. I can’t take pictures of my documents or even use photos that already on my camera roll. I want my money back please.
cute app!
Alenko1
Very cute and nice application. I can take notes easily and apply any type of formatting.
Good app!
nickadeemous
So i've been using the app for a little while now and wanted to give an expanded opinion. I was looking for an app that lets me type text and draw over the text that I type and continue to add text around the drawings. Now the apps I wanted to use were Apple notes and Evernote, but I can't figure out how to do this. These apps let you draw under the text in what appears to be a separate pane. And you can draw over an image in these apps, but not over text which you type and edit. So, Apple Notes and Evernote don't do what I wanted (and I can't figure out why they don't). The apps that do what I wanted were creating the documents in PDF format. Notate and OneNote both do this, but Notate seems to get it right, where OneNote doesn't. The problem is that when you insert lines of text in the middle of documents, you shift the existing lines of text down the page, but the drawn annotations don't move with the text. All these note apps have the same problem, and the way they fix it is to provide a lasso tool to grab and move the annotations to new locations. Notate does this perfectly and quickly, where OneNote instead of lassoing the the drawings, grabs some of the text underneath the drawings. In OneNote you have to wrestle more to separate the drawings from the text underneath, which is a pain and is too slow for you to do when you are taking notes. Also, OneNote is too slow to load (it seems to take time sync with my Office365 account). This makes OneNote too slow to use when I'm in a hurry. Notate beats out OneNote on these points. It's a good app that does what I want.