Note-taker blends gorgeous looks with functional features
Not
too long ago, I had lunch with a graphic designer acquaintance and
fellow Mac cultist who bemoaned the mediocrity of so many iPhone apps.
“They don’t look like they’re Apple quality,” he complained. “They’re
so dull and drab. They’re boring!”

Notable
Appearance: Readdle’s Take A Note uses a brown and light yellow color
scheme that creates an aesthetically pleasing app for the iPhone or
iPod touch.
Now, it isn’t exactly fair to hold every
third-party app developer to a lofty Cupertino standard. But it may be
fairer to say that a healthy majority of apps for the iPhone and iPod
Touch deliver on form or function, but rarely deliver both. Oh, sure,
there are quite a few apps that are as stylistic as they are
functional. Instapaper (
) and Classics (
)
spring instantly to mind. Many developers, however, have the
programming skills but lack the design savvy to effectively meld style
with substance.
That thought occurred to me again as I was using Readdle’s
Take A Note app. I had already reviewed and adopted YouNote (
),
which is an excellent, free note-taking organizational tool for the
iPhone and iPod Touch. YouNote is functional, but not at all beautiful.
Take A Note is drop-dead gorgeous. But is it also functional?
The
answer is an emphatic yes. Although Take A Note lacks some of the
features that makes YouNote a powerful tool, the app makes up for it
with a brilliant design, a clean interface, excellent audio
functionality and easy Wi-Fi backup.
Developer
Igor Zhadanov obviously has a keen aesthetic eye. When you launch Take
A Note, the title screen is a weathered, brown leather spiral notebook
cover. The tasteful brown and light yellow color scheme evokes an old
drawing room or a private detective’s office. All that’s missing, alas,
is the smell of the leather and cigar smoke, and the silky smooth
texture of the pages.
Take A Note organizes your notes by text,
audio, drawing or photo. The app also lets you set up your own
categories, such as “home” or “work” or any esoteric label you wish.
Although I miss YouNote’s color-coding scheme, Take A Note’s simple
checklist-style categorization is a nice feature for keeping notes
orderly. You can also add text comments to audio, photo or drawing
notes.
YouNote’s tagging function is superior, however. Take A
Note will let you apply only one category to each note. But the app
automatically sorts notes by category, which simplifies browsing
somewhat.
Take A Note soundly beats YouNote with its audio note
feature. This is a recorder built for reporters. It has a 100-minute
capacity—limited, really, only by the amount of memory on your device.
The noise reduction on the recorder is excellent, and you can pause,
fast-forward and rewind by tapping and dragging a slide-button. Take A
Note wins additional kudos for the recorder’s clever GUI—an
old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape rolls as you record. All that’s missing
is a way to record phone calls, which is a limitation of the iPhone at
this time. (Please be aware that although Take A Note works with the
iPod touch, it requires an external microphone to use the audio
recording feature.)

Note
The Date: Take A Note organizes your notes in broad chronological
order, but it doesn’t apply date and time stamps to text-based notes.
You
can back up your notes easily to any Mac or PC through a Wi-Fi
connection. Simply create a new network connection on your desktop or
laptop machine, tap the app’s Wi-Fi button, enter the username (it’s
always “notes”) and password (newly generated with each use), and
voila! Take A Note’s files pop open as easy-to-read text files. Perhaps
best of all, this function works both ways—if you tap out notes on your
laptop or desktop machine, copying them into Take A Note is a simple
matter of dragging and dropping a text file into a networked folder. In
this key respect, Take A Note has a decisive edge over YouNote’s
cumbersome back-up process, which requires a hard-wired connection from
device to computer. And Take A Note also lets you e-mail your notes
within the app, a feature that YouNote sorely lacks.
Drawbacks? Take A Note has a few. It doesn’t have landscape
support, for instance. Inexplicably, the app doesn’t apply date and
time stamps to text-based notes, but includes dates and times by
default in audio and picture notes. The app will break down your notes
in broad chronological order—that is, “today,” “this month,” “last
month”—but if you want to know when you made a particular note, you had
best tap in the date and time yourself. Similarly, the app’s search
feature only lets you search by name. Unlike YouNote, Take A Note does
not let you grab and tag Web pages. Although I don’t use that feature
in YouNote very often, it’s nice to have when I need it.
I
maintain that, as an organizer, YouNote is still tops. And the price is
certainly right. But Take A Note’s ease of use and a gorgeous interface
makes it a truly worthy rival, and one that I suspect I’ll be using a
lot more with future updates.