When the first iPad was released, Steve Jobs went up on stage and touted that the iPad would be great for productivity, in many ways replacing a computer. Now a year later, Apple turned the focus from productivity onto games, an area that has been exploding with new apps. The iPad, however, is still a magnificent device to write on, especially using a bluetooth keyboard. In this post, I want to share with you five of my favorite apps for writing on the iPad.
Simplenote
First of the apps is Simplenote, my newly found note taking app. The beauty of this app, apart from that it syncs with the cloud and desktop, is that it is not just limited to notes. Because it has such an extensive way of searching and finding notes, I use it for most writing on the iPad when I just want a blank screen to fill with my words.
Price: Free
Pages
Along with the first iPad, Apple released the iWork suite for iPad. In here we find Pages, the mobile version of the great word processor found on the Mac. If formatting is important for you when you are writing on the iPad, definitely try out Pages, since it offers much of the functionality found on the Mac. The downside is that you need to setup your documents first and it doesn’t do many of them stored and sorting is a nightmare.
Price: $9.95
Dragon Dictation
Perhaps an interesting choice to have in the writing category, but I know many people who would rather dictate what they are writing instead of actually writing it. The best app in the App Store for this is called Dragon Dictation and is free! Just start a new note, tap record and off you go. It does a very good job and if you are not fully happy afterwards, you can edit right from within the app.
Price: Free
CourseNotes
If you are studying in school, college or at the university, this app might prove very useful for you. Along with a brand new companion Mac app, CourseNotes on the iPad lets you take notes, organize them into different subjects and mix between handwritten notes (yep, touch is king here) and written ones with the keyboard. At the end of they day, you have an organized note library from your courses.
Price: $4.99
Notability
Should you prefer the approach that CourseNotes take but want to use it outside school try Notability. This app lets you use the same system, organizing notes by different subjects. Instead of being aimed at a school setting, this app takes it into the broader life spectrum and gives you good organization while taking notes, along with audio clips in a perfectly simple way.
Price: $1.99
I really like PlainText (free) and iA Writer (.99$ when I paid for it) for intensive writing. Mainly because they sync with Dropbox and (when I get to the computer) I can just grab the text file, format it and add it to the book / document / web-entry that I`m currently writing.
Pages is nice but it takes more time to format a document on the iPad than it does on the home computer. I save the media on the ipad and sync it with Dropbox, grab the text file from iA Writer, and merge those in no time in “insert your favorite text processor here”.
I will have a look at SimpleNote… never heard of it.
Sounds like two nice apps, especially with the Dropbox sync. Will be sure to round up a new post with all suggestions here in the comments too!
Have pages and its great at first but dealing with the files is a pain even via dropdav.com to your dropbox acct.
Have just brought the notability app to try, thanks for the info
Dragon Dication seems to be not available on the New Zealand itunes store… maybe just a USA app?
That is one of the pains of reading app reviews… most are done from a USA based itunes store that other parts of the world may not have access to the same apps
Would be helpful if reviews could state which countries an app is available from if it is not global
You can register a USA account and then use pre-payed itunes gift cards to charge that account. This way your kids won`t buy apps for 5k$ in one swoop.
You may be breaking the terms of agreement buy gets the job done.
I agree with you. Being in Sweden myself where the app is not available. I have noticed that the app is available both here and there though. Going through each and every app store to check it unfortunately not feasible for each review, but hey, if you click the link here and wait for the app to open in iTunes, it will tell you if it is not available.
To be fair, I have been known to review apps not in the US app store…
Dragon Dictation was available to download here in Spain, and its quite impressive…
Terry,
I use pages and love it, but there are so many other things I want to be able to do. I also saw the video of Photoshop world with the new layer enhancements for the iPad app, so my question for you is (since you work for Adobe) when is Adobe going to blow Pages out of the way and come out with InDesign for iPad?
Version 3 looks nothing like the photos above, and infact is quite awful. I have emailed the developer my feedback and have been ignored, so i posted to the Facebook page, and my post was deleted.
The new Aqua/candified interface of v3 makes the app look like something most suitable to a 5 year old’s xylophone, circa OSX 10.0
I appreciate that one can change the colours, but the whole candy interface is still an eyesore (as compared to refined, subtle, classy and mature textured tan leather look of version 2. Even the app icon has changed from leather book to candy blue). The file browser names are much bigger font (and cannot be changed) and the bubbles around each folder are massive. I don’t need a fluorescent yellow cartoon/icon next to each subject group, surrounded my fluorescent yellow highlighting with fat psychedelic colours around it. Each item now resembles the windows7 start menu.
Furthermore the forced page breaks are a disaster also, they cannot be disabled, I have been happily storing documents that i had written in macjournal, and exported to RTFD. They have a combination of pictures and text, your forced page breaks are a disaster to my photos, I can only fit 2 photos per page, and the next photo cannot follow (across a page break) hence the text is messed up, and the photos are all messed up (and cannot be resited across hard page breaks).
Do not update to version 3 !