Well, after all this time and although I keep trying new note apps (at least the ones that are free or cheap), Noteshelf is still my favorite. In my opinion it can't be beaten for pure handwriting pleasure. I have been using it to keep a kind of diary, which is something I had never done before.
But as I have been using my iPad as a work tool for a few months now, and it has replaced my note books, I am still trying to find the best app to take notes in meetings. I tried using Noteshelf but (1) I like to keep personal and professional apps separate and (2) my needs for professional notes are a bit different, I like to be able to import and annotate documents (usually MS office documents, but I convert them to PDF so that they can be imported and annotated), and also being able to index and search notes is a bigger issue than with a personal journal.
Lately I have been using
Note Anytime. It's not perfect but it's free so anybody can try it and decide for themselves. It reminds me a lot of Notes Plus, but although it is not as rich in functionalities, it is much easier to use and less sluggish. I would like to use Notes Plus but it seems it can't handle a 70 pages notebook (that I exported as a PDF from Noteshelf): it's so sluggish I keep expecting it to crash. Which it has done repeatedly in the past actually. And the interface of this app is really a nightmare, I'm sorry to say.
So, back to Note Anytime, it has some of the great functionalities of Notes Plus but misses others. A definitive plus is the interface, which is clean-looking and relatively well thought out, although the tools palettes have a tendency to get in the way or change place when I don't want them to. What reminds me of Notes Plus is the lasso tool, which is very powerful: you can use it to select a word or phrase and change the color or line thickness, and of course move or resize it.
Another functionality Note Anytime shares with Notes Plus is the ability to import a PDF file and annotate it. And as I mentioned, it seems better at handling large PDF files without threatening to quit, or explode, or whatever.
The main weakness of Note Anytime is how it handles typed text. You can add typed text to a notebook but autocorrect is not active when typing, which makes it practically unusable for me. Another big problem is that there is no possibility to search for text. You can't even tag pages or bookmark them to find them later. And there is no handwriting recognition, which is not a big problem for me but would still be handy... if typed text was searchable, which it isn't so what would be the point anyway
Oh, and you can import photos of course, but also web pages which act as an image when in edit mode, so that you can annotate them, but become clickable when in view mode so that you can open the original link in Safari. Neat.
So if you don't rely too much on typed text and text search, I would recommend trying out this app since it is free. There are some in-app purchases that are not indispensable but some are nice. I bought additional ink colors, but the purchase is not forever as the ink level goes down as you use it, so eventually I may have to buy a refill, which is annoying but the price is not outrageous, so why not. More worrying, possibly, is that the app is linked to a cloud service which will probably at some time have a paid version, but hopefully the basic service will remain free.