Can't find a good handwritten note taking app. Suggestions?

[Philip McDunnough]

Apparently it's still in windows 8 - but NOT RT .. again RT seems to get the shaft .. sigh

Journal is great. You would have thought that would have been easy to put into RT. Really excellent program. When it wasn't available on the Surface RT I cancelled my order.

Philip

 

[Claudia Wey]

I agree with Nick. Windows 8 doesn't work well with most of the capacitive stylus. The amPen (~$5 on Amazon) is the only one that works great.

 

[Sachinmeet]

Innote just got released

 

[Ben749]

Hi everyone
I'm proud owner of a galaxy note, as well as a Samsung Slate 7 tablet, both use a wacom digitiser screen and same pen works on both.

On galaxy note I use LectureNotes, which is pretty good, except he doesn't recognizes handwriting ..

On the slate 7 ( still under windows 7 ) I'm balanced between windows Journal and OneNote, even when they're lacking features such as :
- custom pen definition ( color, thickness, alpha )
- custom background ( I mainly use black background in my notes .. )
- native palm rejection

Because I mainly write on it with small handwriting, I'm lacking a "thiner" pen definition, or custom background / more colors in OneNote

 

[WillysJeepMan]

The iPad appears to have a higher resolution grid of touch sensors, which gives it smoother inking ability. The RT's touch hardware was designed primarily for touching UI elements, because the OS supports dual touch (active pen and capacitive) and the active digitizer is WAY more accurate for inking. Software (like the app I linked to) can do some smoothing/fitting of the rough points into more curved shapes, but at that point it's just guessing

So on Windows 8 - use digitizer based hardware for fine inking. Use capacitive for touching UI elements. On the iPad, use capacitive for both.

Your observations have mirrored mine. I have done extensive testing and research on the matter. It does appear that the iPad has a higher resolution grid for the capacitive touch sensor. For many uses, a hi-res capacitive sensor array is sufficient... as is evident by what is possible on the iPad.

On the iPad, foam, rubber, and Adonit Jot styli work very well. On the Surface RT, only the Adonit Jot was capable of producing something comparable to the iPad. I think it was a poor decision on Microsoft's part to cheap-out on the capacitive touch, and it is equally disturbing for advocates to suggest going Surface Pro to get acceptable inking results.

Something I've noticed with ALL the tablets... iPad, Samsung, and Microsoft. .. I've had all 3. If your tablet doesn't support a dedicated stylus, make sure you get a "mesh tip" stylus, rather than a rubber tipped one. That makes a HUGE difference in your experience. I switch to the mesh stylus and the Surface exceeded my iPad 2.

That is completely different than my experience. True, mesh glides across the screen better than rubber. But neither produced acceptable results for my on my Surface RT. No where near as good as on my iPads. Try slowly drawing an equilateral triangle (use any app you'd like) on the Surface RT. You'll end up with wobbly sides of the triangle, a curvy stair-stepped line (a result of the lower res capacitive touch sensor array).

 

[Ben749]

Obviously, can't find currently a bette app than windows journal .. kindof shame ..
- the minus are : it tends to have a high cpu / ram usage as a page is filled with stroke, no color picker like sketchbook or lecturenotes
A lecture notes portage to the windows ecosystem should be such a killer ..

 

[onlysublime]

Have you tried Skitch Touch? It also integrates into Evernote. I use it on my RT but not really for doodling (but it has that option). I use it more for annotating pictures.

 

[rkarolak]

If you haven't, you may want to try the handwriting "keyboard." It may be a good alternative.