Awesome Note or Daily Notes for iPad2?

Posted by Ken
May 28, 2012 at 02:03 AM

While I have continued my reading of the forum, it has been some time since I posted due to some health challenges I have been dealing with these past few months. The doctors just recently gave me a clean bill of health, although I am still recovering my strength and stamina, so I am slowly trying to resume my life from where it left off late last year before I took ill. Soon I will be returning to work, and I have been starting to think about ways of improving my work flow as I will not have nearly the energy that I previously had for some time.

There is little I can do with my desktop PC as our IT staff are not very open to software beyond the basics program in Microsoft Office 2007. I am still allowed to use Ecco on my PC, but it is mostly being used for my contacts. My calendar, and to some degree my tasks, have been handled by Outlook since it was installed. This isn’t an ideal set-up, but I have accepted it and tried to make the best of it with some success.

The area where I would like to improve my workflow relates to notes I take in project meetings. For more years than I care to count, I have always carried a yellow notepad with me to project meetings. And, I am usually good about entering any new tasks/assignments into Outlook when I return from my meetings, but this is not always the case. Furthermore, my paper notepads often fall into the abyss of piles on my desk, so they are not as useful as I would like when I am in front of my PC, the place where I spend the majority of my day.

As thoughts of hardware CRIMPing began to creep into my head this past week, I thought that an 11” Macbook Air would be ideal. It is very easy to carry and can be woken from hibernation in seconds. I could take my notes and send them to my PC via the web. Thankfully, I did not have any specific Mac software in mind, so that allowed me to easily place that thought on the back burner and save my wallet around $900USD. I also considered reviving my old Samsung netbook, possibly with Ecco, but the netbook is slow to boot, and is larger than I would care to carry to meetings. Another idea for the back burner.

So, I turned my sights to my beloved iPad2. It is light enough, albeit the external keyboard that I have for it certainly negates some of that size advantage. But, as I am not known for taking long and detailed notes, I figured that I could use the on-screen keyboard to start, and possibly learn to carry the keyboard with me if need be. My thoughts have now turned to more affordable app CRIMPing, and that is where I could use some input from folks. The two programs that I am considering are Awesome Note ( http://bridworks.com/anote/en/main/index.php ) and Daily Notes ( http://www.fluidtouch.biz/dailynotes/ ). Both seem to offer the following:

—folders for projects
—tasks related to projects
—a calendar to view notes/tasks
—exporting in a common format (e.g. PDF)
—syncing with web services

I am tempted to buy both programs to try them, but I would first like to know if anybody has used either one of them. Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated.

Thanks,

—Ken