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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Export to rtf removed
I’m an early adopter. I’ve been happily using Notability to write novels for several years and would previously given it 5 stars. Recently they bought in a subscription model and they’ve been hassling me to renege on my ‘forever’ upfront payment to start paying them rent. I was considering it but I’m glad I didn’t because I would have been incandescent when this feature was removed. This renders Notability useless to me. I like to use Notability to write on my iPad in a comfy chair. I use the text to speech feature to proof. Then I export my stories as rtfs to Word when I’m ready to format them for publication at an uncomfortable desk. I don’t want to convert a pdf. It adds in all this bad formatting that I have to spend hours removing. And the pdf takes up more disc space! The hiding and then removal of this feature was bizarre. Perhaps the company was bought out by Adobe? Since the ability to export to rtf was removed, I have shifted to Pages. It’s not as pretty or as handy as Notability but it works, which Notability unfortunately no longer does.
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Response from developer
Hello, If you have not done so already, can you please submit a support ticket by going through the steps described here: https://support.gingerlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/4414054941594-Contact-Support. We can take a look at your support/device diagnostics and dive deeper. Thanks!
Very good app! Would be perfect with a few improvements
This app has been a huge help to me for college and is the best note taking app I have found, but there is a few things which I think would be useful to make the app even better. First of all, adding a function to create tables to input data into in notes would be really helpful, as currently I have to draw all the lines and place text boxes in each individual box, which is quite laborious with large tables. Secondly, I think headers with the option to have automated page numbers would be very useful for longer notes with lots of different sections, so I can refer back to previous pages. Finally, one quality of life feature which would be nice is the option to create custom themes where you can pick any colour for the UI rather than just the default options. Aside from these things, this app is very good and has many useful tools to help with note taking.
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I Never Thought
I Never thought I’d be able to say that I pay a subscription for a note taking app… but here I am. The truth is, if you have an Apple Pencil, and you just need an app for University, School or what have you, there is truly nothing else like it. The other options are Pages (which is unusable), Freeform (which is laggy and iCloud only), Endless Paper (which lacks tools and cloud storage all together)… the list goes on.
All of these apps have problems and compromises (Including Onenote which only has 1 pen option)
And the final of all options is buy 10 or 12 books which each cost the license to the software, and they themselves are a form of subscription that needs renewing. So all in all, this software is well worth the money and it has extra community bonuses built in which I adore. If I need a specific template for a page I can just look it up and download someone else’s that they made specifically for that one purpose.
If I had one thing to add, just one thing! Adding the support of Proton Drive in the cloud storage sections. Especially for those who like to keep their lives private and data safe online.. (like me)
Thanks devs and Notability Team for a truly well made app. Cheers.
All of these apps have problems and compromises (Including Onenote which only has 1 pen option)
And the final of all options is buy 10 or 12 books which each cost the license to the software, and they themselves are a form of subscription that needs renewing. So all in all, this software is well worth the money and it has extra community bonuses built in which I adore. If I need a specific template for a page I can just look it up and download someone else’s that they made specifically for that one purpose.
If I had one thing to add, just one thing! Adding the support of Proton Drive in the cloud storage sections. Especially for those who like to keep their lives private and data safe online.. (like me)
Thanks devs and Notability Team for a truly well made app. Cheers.
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Needs lots of improvement of the iCloud Syncing Feature
I have been a notability user for about 6 years and until now its been working absolutely fine. However, I needed to upload some homework a while back and it was done on notability. However, as I am about click on the note file to open it shows a loading screen. After waiting a bit, I click on it and it says ‘wait for notability to finish downloading files from iCloud’ or something along those lines. However, a few days after it did finally load, well past from when my homework was due. The interesting fact is I never toggled this feature on. A few days ago the same thing happens, so I look this up and how to fix this and turns out you have toggle iCloud syncing off in order for it to load but even after that it took a good half and hour of me constantly restarting the app and my iPad. I do understand that the longer wait times are possibly because of multiple external factors such as bad internet and device model but regardless, a good note-taking app should pose the ability to work smoothly on most devices and low internet speeds while being able to provide a note when asked for with at minimum a few seconds of delay. This is not expected from what used to be such a great app. Please improve this as soon as possible.
Have a Great Day,
A user of Notability,
Have a Great Day,
A user of Notability,
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Response from developer
Hello, Please see here:https://support.gingerlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/205688797-Troubleshooting-iCloud-Sync - oftentimes this issue may be related to a lack of storage space. These steps may help to resolve the issue. If they do not, or if you have not done so already, can you please submit a support ticket by going through the steps described here: https://support.gingerlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/4414054941594-Contact-Support. We can take a look at your support/device diagnostics and dive deeper. Thanks!
Pretty good but an idea to add
The actual app itself is flawless, its incredibly useful to write and draw with and has plenty of useful features to use at your disposal not to mention its incredibly easy to use as well, me and my friends have used it a lot for my uni work and have never been disappointed, the one thing i would love to see in the toolbox however is a fill tool so u are able to draw abstract shapes free hand and fill them in with a dedicated tool. Also the ability to select an object using the selection tool and change its x and y scales, i love how when u change its size the overall dimension are locked and scaled down accordingly but it is limited to that only, if points on the selection box were added on the selection box in the centre of the edges to change the x and y scales of a selected item would definitely give a bit more freedom, a bit like how Microsoft word selection works, but keeping the dimensions locked when using the corners, both of these would add more degrease of freedom when editing, note taking and doodling
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If you value your sanity and data, try the other popular note taker
I work out of Notability about 40 hours per week. It freezes - a LOT. If you view in the iPhone app a note that you took in iPad, about 10% of the time it will completely wreck the formatting in the note, and the only way to recover is to restore from a previous version (if you’re using the version history feature). And a note about the version history feature - Notability deleted an entire semester worth of lecture recordings from my note, and completely erased all previous backups (a feature that up until that point was working just fine). The test is all there, just no lecture synced with it. And this happened 3 days before my final exam. I trusted Notability with my grade and it didn’t just let me down, it lit my car on fire and pushed it off a cliff.
This was the last straw. I’ve dealt with the many, many bugs (like crashing mid-lecture and then not allowing me to open my note again because it’s “syncing”) for well over a year at this point but I’ve had enough. No matter how many updates they release, there are major flaws that keep popping up. The app looks very polished and feature-rich so it gives the impression of quality, but I promise you that if you rely on the app more than just capturing the occasional 45 minute business meeting, you will regret it. There are other high quality note taking apps that include voice/text sync and are much more stable.
This was the last straw. I’ve dealt with the many, many bugs (like crashing mid-lecture and then not allowing me to open my note again because it’s “syncing”) for well over a year at this point but I’ve had enough. No matter how many updates they release, there are major flaws that keep popping up. The app looks very polished and feature-rich so it gives the impression of quality, but I promise you that if you rely on the app more than just capturing the occasional 45 minute business meeting, you will regret it. There are other high quality note taking apps that include voice/text sync and are much more stable.
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Response from developer
Hello, When able, can you please update to the newest versions of both the app and your device as this may help resolve the issue. If you are still encountering issues, can you please submit a support ticket by going through the steps described here: https://support.gingerlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/4414054941594-Contact-Support. We can take a look at your support/device diagnostics and dive deeper. Thanks!
Love Notability!
Notability is such an easy to use app and integrates well into my studies! I have been using notability for the last 3 years and the app updates are always great. So easy to navigate and organise notes quickly and effectively. I use notability across both my laptop and iPad which helps a lot with integration. I use Notability to compile and edit lecture content from all of my classes. A lot of uni content (medicine) there is a large volume of information so the tools available in notability makes this process much easier.
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