LOVE this app!!!
I have been using this app for my notes for maybe 6 months now, but what prompted me to write a review was the new AI study tool. I don’t usually like the AI features in a lot of stuff, i find them redundant and like they don’t add anything useful to the experience (looking at you grammarly…😔). BUT notably’s new AI feature is nothing like that! It takes your notes, reorganizes them into just key points and sub points, and even adds relevant information when useful! The quiz feature is also soooo nice! I usually quiz myself on my notes, and this adds an extra way to practice and it is great! Overall, I love this app, all the features and writing utensils are great and easy to use, and the record feature is also really helpful. It provides a transcript and links what you write to the time you write it, so if you’re studying and need clarification, you can go back into the lecture recording and see what was going on when you were writing. Everything about this app is awesome, and so worth the yearly subscription. So many other note taking apps will charge you notably’s yearly fee monthly!! I think it is only $16 for a whole YEAR and it is so worth it. If you can i would recommend the premium version after you try out the free version to get used to it. Absolutely no complaints, five stars from me !🩷🩷🩷
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Recently Disappointing
I’ve been using Notability for the last 4 years, before it became a subscription-based service. In the last couple of years since the introduction of the subscription based service and an overhaul of the interface, it has become far more buggy.
It took the Notability team the better part of 2 months to figure out how to restore my lifetime subscription with my iCloud ID (and to-date I don’t think they’ve figured it out), I’m on an Annual subscription atm. Things don’t sync across my devices the way they used to anymore. I thought it was fine because I liked the product and the options for handwritten annotations; so I put up with the glitches in the process of adding pictures to my notes and the splicing together of my different pages from different documents.
But after months of bugs, the last straw finally happened earlier today - I sat through 2 hours of a lecture and took down my notes faithfully, only for Notability to freeze at the syncing screen at the end of the lecture. I closed my iPad and when I came back to it, my entire set of notes - two hours worth of verbatim typing (I didn’t even use the transcript feature) - was gone. It wasn’t in the trash, it wasn’t saved locally, and it wasn’t in the cloud (because it didn’t sync!). There was no way to recover the notes. I can no longer make excuses for a product that I used to love, even with the amazing handwriting interface.
It took the Notability team the better part of 2 months to figure out how to restore my lifetime subscription with my iCloud ID (and to-date I don’t think they’ve figured it out), I’m on an Annual subscription atm. Things don’t sync across my devices the way they used to anymore. I thought it was fine because I liked the product and the options for handwritten annotations; so I put up with the glitches in the process of adding pictures to my notes and the splicing together of my different pages from different documents.
But after months of bugs, the last straw finally happened earlier today - I sat through 2 hours of a lecture and took down my notes faithfully, only for Notability to freeze at the syncing screen at the end of the lecture. I closed my iPad and when I came back to it, my entire set of notes - two hours worth of verbatim typing (I didn’t even use the transcript feature) - was gone. It wasn’t in the trash, it wasn’t saved locally, and it wasn’t in the cloud (because it didn’t sync!). There was no way to recover the notes. I can no longer make excuses for a product that I used to love, even with the amazing handwriting interface.
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Good if I knew it wasn’t free to start
It poses like a free software with optional purchases but turns out its only a free trial. If I’d known that BEFORE I started using it and THEN was notified I was running out of editing moves and it would become read-only I would have trialed it on a lesser project. Now I think differently of it because I have to start what I was working on again with another app or else pay for a subscription. I don’t do subscription based apps at all. I would make a one off payment for a software that impressed me during a trial but I will not be continuously pay for anything without an end date except for insurance.
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