I am still trying to find the best way to work with the iliad for note-taking, meeting minutes etc., largely to try to get around the slow switching between applications. Previously I created a set of notes for meeting minutes (see
here on the irex forum) but I have found that I often need to refer to notes from previous meetings, so I press escape, wait . . . , go to the previous notes, open, wait . . ., etc. I got fed up with this. I then wanted to try to keep all meeting notes in one file, but there was no way to add a new page that used the first page template (with an outline for meeting details) when on the last page (did you follow that?).
Like others here I have also found that the lack of zoom and pan in the notes application limits drawing things like mindmaps because you need to be able to write clearly enough and also have enough real estate to be able to get all the ideas down.
So, like others here I decided that the best thing to do is create a large PDF file with the pages I need and draw, write, zoom and pan. The thing that I think is new with this notepad PDF is that it can easily be indexed. The PDF has 77 pages and there are 76 pages to write or draw on. The first page of the PDF is the index page and is divided into 4 quadrants. Each quadrant has a set of numbered lines, and the total is 76---one for each usable page in the PDF. The idea is that you zoom into one quadrant and write a short description of what is on each page. If you zoom out I find that it is possible to read everything that is written and thereby quickly find the page number of the thing you want.
Moreover, each index entry is in fact a hyperlink to the page in question. So, for example, you can write "Meeting with Fred on 2008-01-23" in the index page and then click on it to take you to that page. It does not use the keyboard and character recognition: the hyperlinks are just part of the PDF and you just scribble a description over the top.
This version of the indexed notepad has 3 types of pages: 18 plain pages, 18 lined pages, and the rest are meeting minutes pages. Each "page" is in fact 4 quadrants, so, as with the index page, you zoom into one quadrant and use it to write or draw, then pan to the next quadrant and can zoom out to see the whole page. For me this means I can easily write while zoomed in, and still read the whole thing when zoomed out.
The meetings and lined pages are the easiest to play with at first because they clearly have 4 quadrants. The meetings pages each have sections for Date, Title, Participants, Agenda items in the top left quadrant, with the remaining three quadrants being for notes. The lined pages are just four pages with lines.
The plain pages have (very) small "crop marks" in the four corners plus at the centre of each page edge. To zoom in to the top left quadrant you'd use the markers half way down the left and halfway along the top. There are also markers that identify a shape the size of a quadrant in the middle of the page. So, if you want to draw a mind map you might zoom into this centre area, draw, pan, draw again, then zoom out to see the whole page.
I am still playing with this and might try to make it prettier, once I am convinced that it works okay. At the moment I am not sure if I want to have a notepad with multiple types of pages as I have created at the moment, or separate notepads for meetings, and general notes.
Using
Alanine's continuous mode ipdf works nicely with this. Zoom in to the top left quadrant and then the flip bar just takes you through each quadrant as though going to a new page.