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CourseNotes: The perfect student companion for iPad?
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As you may be able to guess from the name, CourseNotes is geared toward students. We loved the clean and easy-to-use interface, and intend to use this app for taking notes when we attend workshops over the holidays. The app lets you keep your notes organized by subject and class meeting. You can also mark items as ToDo items for easy browsing later on. Export via e-mail or peer-to-peer with other CourseNotes users. A bonus: you can also keep a lexicon of terms and definitions for each subject.
In using CourseNotes, we thought of it as a great compliment to Grades on the iPhone (even though CourseNotes is an iPad app), and similar to Evernote and even Apple’s own Notes. So immediately there’s a lot to love because you can organize notes between classes and things. This begs the question: “Is there any super-awesome-additional functionality asides from Lexicons that makes it a must have app? I mean, why not use Evernote that immediately syncs between all your devices?”
Basically you can make a variety of subjects. Whether you’re being schooled on awesome things like Apple product philosophy or something as boring as anthropology, CourseNotes let’s you make a subject for it. When you start the app, you can start a quick session, or delve into a subject to review notes and to-do items. Starting a quick session will give you the option to start taking notes. You can assign your note a title, then begin typing. There’s nothing special here: you just have your basic typing interface, and the ability to change the title’s colors (if you haven’t typed a title, there’s no indication on what color you chose). While a major update is in the works for drawing and things, right now this isn’t available, and I’ll follow up with a quick update.
The application is solid, and works how it should. But goodness, taking notes on the iPad with the virtual keyboard is like trying to do wind sprints on a sheet of ice: it’s impossible. With the virtual keyboard, we find it tricky to keep up with the lecturer – not a clear advantage. Now while we’ve gotten pretty good with the keyboard in general (even without looking), without that tactile feedback, being under so much stress and trying to type quickly is hard.
Some of the cool features: You can highlight a word (a technical term if you will) and make a definition for it. If you ever have to refer to it again, you can in your Lexicon database. If you don’t know the definition, you have the option to look it up in Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is terrible for college references (I’ve never had a professor that gave me the okay to use a Wikipedia reference in any assignment – ever), and I wish there were links instead to other technical databases and encyclopedias.
Back to sessions real quick, each time you start a new session, you can create as many notes as you want for that session. For example, it’s like if I had a class (a session) at 1:30, I could make a bunch of index cards based on the different topics presented in that session. It’s neat since you have this organizational structure that’s as flexible as you want it to be. While there are some odd UI decisions, being able to organize notes specifically for class is a welcome feature. Student will have everything available in one place, and they’ll always have custom reference lexicons available for each subject.
Though there were some wonky UI decision (at least in my opinion), taking notes is okay (more the iPad’s limitation than the app’s), and I liked the fact that they were automatically dated. For those who wish to give CourseNotes the love it deserves, we’re giving away three copies to iPad toting students. CourseNotes is available from the App Store for $4.99.
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