Friday 16 August 2013

Writing, Blogging And Note Taking Part Three

Back to Part Two

Overview

It pays to be organised and to make some good choices for how you're going to enter text. My personal preference is to dictate as much as possible and that is whether I'm using my iPad, my Galaxy S3 or my iMac. The dictation available on the Mac is the best with DragonDictate. I'm finding that for mobile dictation the better of the two is the Android service although the Siri based dictation is usable. When it comes to typing on the mobile devices then once again the Android device wins due to the fact that often I often only have to tap the screen once to put in a complete word. I love the way that it intelligently guesses the word I want next as well as the words I'm typing as I go. I really miss that feature when I go back to the iPad and I need to do some text entry with the keyboard.

Which apps to use

I prefer to use Evernote although it is a notetaking application for the curation of information I get from elsewhere. I will sometimes add text to it to supplement my collection of notes. For the quick note which is to capture an idea, on my Mac I will always use Mou as my first choice, but occasionally I remember that I have NVAlt.

 

Quick notes on iOS I will always use Drafts and I therefore have no requirement for any other notetaking application. It is quite good sometimes to prune away some of the unused applications from the system then I can always choose the one application to always know where to find any notes that I have made. Another possibility for taking notes on iOS is to use one of the applications that allows handwriting. Some of these handwriting-based applications will actually do an OCR so that you can at a later stage make a search through those notes. Seeing as I have scribbly unreadable handwriting I don't tend to use these applications very often, but it is nice to have them available just in case.

Draft on Android

Draft notetaking app for Android is not perfect but performs the task of text entry capture very well. I have found that when I write markdown in Draft that it works perfectly, also when I share it out to use those notes on other platforms in other applications. It doesn't work so well the other way round as when I bring markdown text into Draft, it doesn't read the format very well and I lose the spaces in between the paragraphs. On a long document it would be very tedious to put them back in again so I just don't bring in markdown from elsewhere. Draft, even though it is not perfect still gets a thumbs up from NoStylus, just so long as you remember its limitations.

Go To Part One

No comments:

Post a Comment