7Notes: Turning thoughts into words and pictures

All keyboards aside, what are we really trying to do here — take our thoughts, ideas, other people’s thoughts, save them… and share them.

There are two major problems doing that with a set of alpha-numeric keys: First, you are stuck recording all of your ideas verbally. Sometimes an image is worth a thousands words, and when all you have is a set of keys, your stuck cranking out those words instead of a doodle.

Second, when you’re typing, all of your notes are linear. This can be problematic when you want to make an outline of the content and jump around a lot (very difficult). And linear notes also don’t take advantage of our spacial memory.

For these two reasons and many more, pen and paper have been king in note taking scenarios, which is why I’m always on the look out for new “drawing” methods of note taking, especially when they’re digital. A digital drawing environment gives you the benefits of pen and paper, while adding searchability, “savability”, and all the other 21st century “abilities”.

As tablets become more popular, I think we’re getting closer to replacing paper (at least for the ‘haves’ side of the digital divide). And with tablets, i.e. touch screens, we have a whole new market for software based data entry methods.

7Notes is one of these new crop and as Tech Crunch puts it: >Recognizing handwritten text isn’t trivial, which is why a new app called 7notes focuses almost entirely on this problem–and does the job really well.

In addition to doing a good job at recognizing handwriting (check out TC’s review to see how good), 7Notes also offers some extra nifty features including:

Predictive typing
Formating with color
Mixing text with images
Annotating images
“Social Doodling” which is the ability to share and edit other people’s files

So if this sounds like it’s right up your alley, or you have been looking for an excuse to try out that new stylus that you bought with your iPad, check them out. They have a free and premium version for the iPhone and iPad (sorry, only premium gets you hand writing recognition).

So get scribbling and tell us what you think.

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By Elliott Williams

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2 Responses to 7Notes: Turning thoughts into words and pictures

John Lambie

December 23, 2011 at 10:09 am

Here’s the 7Notes review on Frackulous:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o-zyy0Tel4

John Lambie

December 23, 2011 at 10:14 am
I’ve had a bit of a play with 7notes and here are my observations:

Good:
1. Flexibility between verbal and visual (which you captured well)
2. A great tool for those who are more visually expressive
3. But a great ‘mash-up’ type tool for incorporating a range of different inputs – text, handwriting, sketches, clip-art, photos Greater freedom of expression
4. With increased use (and mastery) can see it becoming quite a fun little app
5. Perhaps also for the older gen who are more “pen-to-paper” types… and kids migrating from (or bypassing altogether) crayons and cut-outs
Bad:
1. A lot of jumping around between menus
2. The web-grab function I could never get to work
3. Rendering seemed slow (perhaps coz it was just the free version)
4. I was toggling a lot between stylus and keyboard – which had me picking up, putting down, looking for stable surfaces – so it didn’t feel like a MOBILE tool -very much a desk-based one
5. Damned by the capacative stylus option – as an ex Wacom tableteer, I’m really disappointed with drawing/writing via those clumsy round-nubbed styli for iPad etc. Makes all your notes and drawings look really childish. I fancy myself as a pretty good drawer and calligrapher, and am yet to be impressed by capacative (and trust me I’ve tried a bunch of apps all promising precision) – give me a resistive tool any day!
Which all added up to a lot of interruptions to my train of thought

7Notes: Turning thoughts into words and pictures

2 Responses to 7Notes: Turning thoughts into words and pictures

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