Microsoft OneNote for iPad is an incredibly powerful note-taking application that stores all of your to-dos, notes, photos, and clippings in the cloud. It works a lot like Evernote, but is more geared towards students and professionals rather than hobbyists. OneNote uploads the notes to SkyDrive, which requires you to have a Windows Live ID to access them. If you've already got a Hotmail or Xbox Live account, you're already set. Conversely, you can also register with your own email address, so it's not a proprietary service. Either way, the notes are viewable on all iOS devices and the web.
The free version gives you the ability to store up to 500 notes and is totally worth if you're looking to a viable alternative to Evernote's all-for-one interface.
Download Microsoft OneNote [iTunes Link]
Geoduck
March 03, 2012 at 2:53pm
mboltz
What are OneNote, or Evernote for?
At work Office 2010 came with OneNote. It's on everyone's computer. Nobody uses it, primarily because nobody understands what its purpose is. They ask me and I can't answer them. If we want to take notes we generally use spiral notebooks. If we want to do note taking on the computer we use Word or WordPad, or Write, or TextEdit.What is special about a note taking app vs a regular text editor or word processor? Understand I'm not being snarky here. I honestly don't see the purpose of dedicated note taking apps and I'm asking because you said you use one 'all the time'.
mboltz
March 04, 2012 at 10:05am
Text editors and word processors are certainly useful for note taking in principle. I even use vi from time to time when I need to jot a quick note, especially transient ones that I know I will only need for a short while.
Where Evernote is useful is in easily grabbing excerpts from Web sites, PDFs, other sources, adding photos, other files, etc. and throwing it all in one place, yet having it searchable in the future, as the notes can be tagged, and it automatically includes the URL source of the text, etc. Then it's all synced between all my devices automatically with no effort on my part.
I do agree that I've never seen OneNote used before, and I personally find Microsoft overrated in many cases. I have no Microsoft on any of my machines and I'm very happy to maintain that.
mboltz
March 02, 2012 at 4:37pm
Nice article and glad to see Microsoft is [finally] creating apps for iOS. But the statement "like Evernote, but is more geared towards students and professionals rather than hobbyists" is a bit disingenuous. I use Evernote all the time as a professional, and I know many other professionals in IT, writers, etc. that also use Evernote on a daily basis for work. It's a fantastic application, is well integrated with OS X, covers all my iOS devices, and gets better with every release. It's not just for hobbyists.
