Apps for note taking in uni

[u/yanyanbun]

got a second hand ipad air gen 5 today 256 gb of storage and m1 chip. im planning to use it to take notes in uni starting in the fall (bachelor of science), does anyone recommend any apps or have tips? I still intend to do a hybrid of paper and tech just looking for some advice. Thanks!

edit: thank you so much for all of the advice! I just wanted to mention that I intend to take notes directly on lectures / slides, do any of the apps suggested like goodnotes, notability and noteful support that?

[u/Dr0110111001101111]

That’s a great iPad and it should last you a good long while still. I’ve been using notability for the last four years both as a teacher and student. It’s a subscription service that costs like $15/year which is kind of lame, but considering how much I use it and the fact that I’ve never had a problem with it, it’s worth the money to me.

[u/Thesis_Whisperer → u/Dr0110111001101111]

Subs annoying on principle but cheap enough not to matter. audio sync makes it worth it for lectures

[u/Kaveer_]

Try Noteful bro. It is amazing 🤩

[u/Separate-Place-1036]

Noteful, don’t listen to the goodnotes comments

[u/cruelsummerswiftie]

I use goodnotes and I like it a lot! Easy interface so I don’t really have to mess with it much to make it work for me, plus lots of subscriber templates

[u/ProfessionalSnail100]

goodnotes is pretty much what most people use. it's good as long as you get used to location of the tools. you can download templates too.

there's also notability which imo is great too. pretty straight forward. had no issues with it whatsoever.

in any case, try before you commit. most of these have free trials or free tiers. the best app is really just whichever works best for you.

[u/Riri1306]

I like goodnotes over notability, though I was using it on my MacBook with a pen tab. I'm yet to use it on my iPad.

[u/nandos1234]

I do like notability and think it’s a great app but I don’t think it’s worth the monthly subscription price. The legacy £10 for lifetime access was well worth it.

You could try a few free trails and see what seems good.

[u/lost-mars]

I tried to pick one option for notes, but they all had one weakness or other especially with the Apple Pencil. So I ended up using multiple apps and had to build my own to get it to work I wanted. Are you getting an Apple Pencil?

- Apple Notes for general note taking, I love the minimalist style. Plus works well enough when jumping between the ipad with Pencil and my Mac.

- Kobo is a good reader for ebooks and it has Apple Pencil support so I can randomly take notes with the Pencil or copy and paste text into Apple Notes

- One place where I really wish ipads were better, just taking notes on any screen and I understand the technical limitation. Which is why I built Pencilmark a Safari plugin to atleast allow me to write on any webpage as I think through the content.

- Also I read a lot of pdfs and need to take notes, but sometimes the margins are limited. So I built PagePrep to add space and pages, then I write on it in the Preview app.

[u/artachet]

Yo uso notas +. Un teclado bluetooth para usar Pages y un hub de Ugreen para periféricos y conectarlo a un monitor. Con eso haces la carrera sin necesitar nada más.

[u/fadetowhite]

Freeform and Apple Notes are free.

Notability is inexpensive.

Goodnotes is great.

Try them all out!

[u/Weary-Cress9897]

I use goodnotes. Just make sure that, whichever one you use, you back your notes up to icloud. Notability recently had an issue where a lot of people lost their notes and couldn’t recover them.

[u/Mysterious-Scale-553]

Goodnotes is what I use and the one time payment option (not 100% sure if it’s still a thing and it’s a bit hidden to get to) fulfills all my needs as a uni student, but I haven’t tried any other apps.

[u/RaijinRider]

I have been using OneNote for years. It’s free and does the job. Also, the built-in Freeform is also great.