Notability App Reviews

I use Notability mainly for annotating research papers and lecture notes in college. It is great for highlighting and writing small notes. I would love there to be some sort of tag system for notes. There are problems sometimes with the app crashing or hanging but this is very rarely. Overall a great app!

Great app to keep all notes organized. However, when you make changes to date/time on the iOS device (iPhone/iPad) it does not update on the OS X platform. Not the best if wanting to keep a chronological order. In summary, if you guys fix that bug it would change my 4 stars to 5 stars. Thanks for your hard work.

This app is wonderful. I use it all day long on the Mac, iPad, iPhone. I do all my notes and journaling using this app. I love the functionally across all devices and I can use it in so many ways. Absolutely LOVE IT!

Currently in grad school and used to take notes on paper until it became a little too cumbersome and inconvenient. Many of classmates were using Notabilit already although I heard the iPad version has more features compared to my MacBook version. Either way, it is a really awesome app that allows me to organize my notes like never before. I save to Google Drive where notes are saved as PDF. With the Drive app I can read my notes at any time, anywhere. Suggestion to developer: Kindly add more options to the backup feature e.g. how frequently do I want it to back up and also a “backup now” type of button. Currently it backs up for several days then it seems to stop and I only notice that when I look at my Drive notes and see they dont have the most up to date changes. It would also be nice to have the ability to change the fill in color within a textbox just like the iPad folks. Overall: Recommend this app !

Honestly love Notability. Very easy way to organize all of your notes. However, I wish they add some features in regards to inserting templates for shapes and charts. I’m talking about basic shapes like a rectangle or a circle. As for charts, they should be able to add a simple table to organize information. I feel like that is honestly the only thing it is missing.

I previously had a very persistent issue with crashes anytime I used the search feature in the Notability Mac app, but this has finally been resolved after I emailed Ginger Labs (I was very pleasantly surprised to get an email back saying they were able to duplicate the issue and were working on a fix. It’s rare to get that kind of customer service, hence the uprating to 5 stars). I’m happily changing my rating to 5 stars since it deserves no less when used as a companion app to the iPad version. I love having my notes on every device in the exact same format, and the new improvements to the way Notability handles PDFs gives me even more uses for the app. See old review below. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I’m changing my previous 4 star review to 1 star due to issues I’ve had with Notability crashing when I try to use the search feature on the Mac. Every time I use the search bar to find a particular word or phrase in my notes, the app crashes either immediatley or within 10-15 seconds. This problem was present at the time of my initial review, but I assumed such a glaring issue would have a fix in a short amount of time. I’ve been experiencing this problem for months at this point. I’ll update my review if/when this issue is addressed. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Notability then allows me to easily review my notes at home on my MacBook. Unlike the people behind many note taking apps, I feel like the developers of Notability actually spoke to real students to find out what they want in a note taking app. Pros: -iCloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox syncing -Easy to understand and use layout -Great pen input on the iPad (I use a Precision Touch stylus) -Easy to type in -Allows me to write/type/highlight my notes onto a power point -Individual slides are treated as continuous pages of one document instead of each one being its own "note" (Looking at you OneNote). -The recording function is really cool, but I generally don’t have the time to review what the lecturer was saying Cons: -What this app NEEDS is an ability to customize default pens and texts that you can access with a SINGLE click of a button. For instance, it would be ideal if I could have one pen be 4pt black font and another 4pt red font so that I can quickly swap between the two with one tap. -Some bugs and crashing when using the Search feature on the MacBook.

I liked this app on my iPad and really tried to like it on my Mac, but it is aweful. Every time I launch it on any on of two iMacs and my MacBook Pro, it progressively hogs all the memory until the computers are rendered useless. I have to restart the computers to release the memory. Notability support is no help. I wanted to use it in place of NoteBook, which is now defunct, but I guess I will have to look for something else.

The iOS version is awesome as you can draw with the stylus and change the style of paper and lining. However these options are unavaliable on the mac version (exclude the stylus features). It would be useful to provide said options as well as two view multiple page of notes as once. The syncing works great but it would be nice to look at a past history of alterations if need be to revert back to those versions. Nonetheless, their support team has been awesome in helping me with all my issues. Another nice fix would be to highlight text and have audio recording to be synced with it. This may be too much to ask for but the developers have been very consistent with keeping updated.

The feature this app is missing is the ability to add tables. I can’t use it without that. Otherwise, I like it.

I use Notability everyday and I absolutly love it. I am in college right now and it replaces all the notebooks I have ever owned. I love the ability to search for key words in my notes so I can find it easily. I recommend this app due to the simplicity of just making a note and having it with you wherever you go! To the developers, can you PLEASE add Recording as an option by itself when you push the Up-box arrow? It’s sometimes confusing to get the recordings by itself after finding the ZIP file. I would like to be able to email recordings to other people in my class that are absent and stuff like that. THANKS!

An amazing app for organizing and highlighting PDFs as a college student. The one feature I would love to see is the support of multi- window or multi notes setup. I often want to view 2 notes in the same notebook at the same time, say a homework assignment and the supporting notes. Currently flipping back and forth is a huge pain.

The crash came on trying to import a 1.8MB JPG file. It hung and I force quit. On restart of the app, the file was there. Overall, Notability is a substantial improvement over the stock Notes function and will likely see heavy use toward the many blog articles I write.

It’s the only note taking application I use!! It is outstanding!! I just wish you could open more than one note at a time. Maybe open more than one noteablility windows on the mac??

still waiting on option to choose paper templates. I don’t understand why it is taking so long to include such a simple feature available on iPad versions.

Does exactly what I want it to do. It makes it easy to categorize notes, and keeps them in sync between my devices. It does a lot more than that, I just use these simple features. I love to be able to markup my notes with descriptive text and styles and such. I don’t like that their are IAP for new ‘themes’ that is lame imho. Seriously we bought the app, give us the new themes. PDF markup is really nice as well. I love this app and will never use anything else.

I really like this application and I use it on both my iPad and my Mac. The only problem I have with this application is that taking notes on the computer is not as convenient and useful as taking notes on the iPad. If there were more formatting tools and if the formatting were more easy to use, this app would definitely get 5 stars.

I keep having recurring issues with syncing notes from the OS X notability to iOS version. Although notability has a beautiful interface, it fails on the most essential aspect of a note taking app: having notes show. This is such a huge hassle. Im currently moving all my notes over to OneNote which is proving to be a pain since all pdf exports are lower in quality. Problem: notes with images (~30mb as exported) cannot be imported onto ios app. Have tried ALL troubleshooting (disabling icloud on both devices, restarting, uninstalling, multiple times…). Notes appear on my mac and not in ios even after deleting my data and disabling icloud in mac. In ios i dont see the iCloud ‘name of notes’. I am unsure how they can be restored in my mac when they dont even appear in ios. EDIT: this is most likely an iCloud related matter since after about 2 hours my devices have actually synced. Suggestion: It would be awesome if i could organize my notes by dragging them

I use this app daily for Physician Assistant school. I toggle between the ipad and mac. Here’s my thoughts: Pros: 1. Multiple colors, widths of pen/highlighter functions are very nice - in this way it is superior to OneNote 2. It’s definitely geared for more creative types who like to really personalize and color-code notes and things. 3. The organizational bar on the side can be color coded, and the subject + dividers are a nice touch. 4. Recording is quick and easy, as it links it right to the slide that you’re on. Cons: 1. Syncing between ipad and laptop is hit or miss. It is either immediate or takes a long time. 2. The program always crashes when searching for something! 3. It will only snap to split screen if the left search bar is closed. Suggestions: 1. please make an update button like with emails to force syncing 2. fix the crashes when doing searches 3. fix it to allow split screen 4. an option of tabs at the top would be nice instead of requiring the side bar to toggle between documents

I have been using notability for my entire Freshmen year of college so far, and I absolutey love it. I struggled a lot my first few weeks of college trying to figure out the best way to take notes. I printed my powerpoints in every possible format, typed notes on my computer in the notes section of the powerpoint, took notes in a notebook, and multiple other methods. Everything was disorganized and I never had all the pictures from my powerpoints plus the written information in one convienent place. I got Notability for both my Mac and my iPad and ever since then, I have been more organized and my grades are so much better. I even bought the iPad pro with the Apple Pencil because I loved it so much. I can easily open PDFs and powerpoints from emails or my school affiliated app, write or type all over them while recording what my professor is saying. Then I can play the recordings back and watch my notes be “written” again so I know what place the recording is at. This helps immensely when I can’t understand what I wrote or how a problem was solved, because I can go to the recording that was taken place as I was writing it. I then upload google drive and print them if I need to study them on paper, or view them from my phone and Mac. Then I type outlines or make notecards to study from. The features of Notability are great because I am a perfectionist and am always changing the size, color, and placement of what I write. I can select it and drag it all around. I can also delete or add in certain pages at any place in the note. I have everything organized according to subjects, and it is also easy to carry over from year to year. If i need to brush up from something from last semester, I simply pull it up in Notability instead of digging through an old binder. This is by far the best way to take notes in college, especially if you have science classes. Just get a decent stylus with a writing tip and you’re set. The zoom features also makes your writing so much more neat. The only reason this app is not getting 5 stars for me is because I wish there were more ways to organize folders and subjects. I wish I could have multiple folders within folders, such as how a computer is set up. Then I could group my notes based on year, subject, and exam number or project. Also, if there was an overlay that had grid lines so that I can write straight on my powerpoint notes and then hide them when I go to study, that would truly make this app 5 star.

Notability is an incredible app! I love it and it’s helped me save a lot of trees this school year. HOWEVER, there is no option to rotate documents in the app! What gives? Many of my professors are unable to scan and upload documents oriented the right way and this makes using notability a little annoying on my ipad, and VERY annoying (read: impossible) on my mac. Please add a rotate feature and the ability to save it oriented the right direction!