[CoronarJunkee]

So I just performed a writing app contest. LectureNotes (trial version), Write (stylus labs), Onyx Scribbler and Neo Reader (with a self-made notebook-style pdf) had entered the competition.

LectureNotes is quite okay in terms of the writing experience. there's a noticeable lag which is annoying but if you're comfortable in note taking while not looking at what you're writing, that lag is quite manageable. There's an incredible bunch of options to personalise just about everything in this app. I use the "big stylus" with the button and the eraser tip but unfortunately didn't manage to get these two to work. I guess that makes me unwilling to put up with the lag. Nice things about the app: everything is organised in notebooks which appearance you can customise. I thought it would be gimmicky but I guess it could be kind of helpful after all. Of course, on the b/w eInk-screen, setting a notebook cover colour doesn't make much sense at all.

Write has lots of fun functionalities. It considers itself a text processing software for handwriting. So you can select your text and move it around. You can insert blank lines between your handwritten ones etc. You can also scale the text you've already written. The rendition of the handwriting is very smooth and seems to rely on vector graphics. So even when your text is blown up a lot, you still don't see pixels. But the lag is immense. Meaning you can look at the screen once you're finished writing and see the text slowly appear (like in LectureNotes, every stroke you make appears at once. So if you write an entire word in one stroke, there'll be no word at all first, then an entire word at once, after a bit of processing time). This makes it very useless for everyday note taking, as far as I'm concerned. It probably needs a better processor to really shine.

Onyx Scribbler is really basic compared to the previous two apps. There isn't much you can customise, really. Blank page, a few options for your pencil line and that's it. The scribble bar is always in the way so you never get to scribble at the lowest part of the page. The scribbling itself is a lot smoother (more responsive) than on LectureNotes or Write but you can see that the smoothness of the text's appearance is compromised by this (I suppose). You can see it's very pixelated right away. It's okay to use for note taking, I guess, but the result is quite unpleasant (and looks like you clearly have a horrible hand writing).

Neo Reader has the most responsive writing experience of all (it's almost immediate and I'm a quick writer). For me, in terms of responsiveness, it's behaving in a nice balance with the resistance of the stylus on the screen surface. Fells "right", somehow. The look of the writing is much smoother than in Scribbler, but much less so than in LectureNotes or Write. It's acceptable for me. At least, my handwriting in the app looks like my analog handwriting does. So I'd really go for this one if I found a way to work around the aforementioned problems (how to create empty note taking-pdfs from an existing file without all of them having the same scribbles on them, and without loosing the scribbles either). So if anyone has an idea, I'd gladly hear it. I guess it has to do with how NeoReader identifies a document to assign it the scribbles. So maybe that could be adapted somehow... Booxter...?

Oh and another info: Erasers. On Scribbler and Neo Reader the eraser tip of my "big stylus" is recognised. But besides that: LectureNotes (and Write as well? not sure about this one and I have already deleted the app) erases only those parts of the text which have actually been crossed by the eraser tool. You can, thus, erase only parts of a stroke. On the other hand, if you want to erase an entire word, you need to stroke away like crazy until you've crossed all parts of the word out (like on paper). But: LectureNotes has an "undo"-feature that lacks on the Onyx apps (this wouldn't be helpful, however, if it's a word somewhere in the middle of your writing you need to erase). Both Onyx apps erase an entire stroke if you touch it with the eraser. So if you wrote an entire word in one stroke and only want to erase the last letter, the entire word will be gone. While that might sound inconvenient at times, it makes for "speed erasing" entire sentences quite quickly and accurately.

I guess, for a start, that's it. If anyone has more hints on scribble apps and/or workarounds, please share!

Cheers,

CJ