Best tools for taking note

We all know that how important it is to take notes regularly. You make an effort to capture ideas every day. And you spend time recording your thoughts. More and more students are taking their laptops or their smartphones to school with them and taking notes on these gadgets instead of in their notebooks. This not only goes for students but for business people as well.

So, where do you put your thoughts, your ideas, or the name of a movie someone recommended?

As technology continues to advance. Now, you need a note-taking app you can depend on. This way you can spend more time developing your ideas and less time waiting for inspiration to arrive.

Note taking apps are the digital equivalent of notebooks, and because they're digital, they can do more for you than paper ever could. Note taking apps can store your notes in the cloud and sync them across multiple devices. As long as you have the internet, you have your notes. These apps have search functionality. In a matter of seconds, you can find whatever notes you need, even if they are years old. The best note-taking apps let you snap pictures and save them as notes, upload files, record audio, and clip pages from the web. We've never seen a paper notebook that lets you dictate notes using your voice, either.

If you want to have a more comprehensive read when it comes to getting things done, here are the best digital apps and tools for taking notes.

Let's see -

Simplenote

Simplenote is as simple as they come. If you want the ability to sync your notes across all of your devices without paying a subscription, then Simplenote has you covered. You can also share notes with other users and collaborate. Once you create your free account, you can start creating notes, tagging them, pinning them, and sharing them. The interface is very straightforward and easy to get to grips with. Simplenote is compatible with iOS devices, Android, MacOS, Windows, and even Linux. Your notes will automatically backup online and sync across all your devices.

Evernote

Evernote is a free, cross-platform universal capture application. With support for text, images, audio, tagging, and syncing between its web interface and all of your desktop installations, Evernote offers seamless capturing of information no matter where you are. Images you add to Evernote are searchable by text, and Evernote even supports several mobile devices. If you can't install Evernote on a computer, you can also use Evernote's web interface and clipping bookmarklet to pull anything into your notebook. Evernote is free to use, provides 40MB per month of upload space; for $5 per month or $45 per year, you get 500MB.

OneNote

Microsoft’s OneNote has come a long way in recent years and it easily goes toe-to-toe with Evernote in features. Even though OneNote is part of Microsoft Office, it’s still entirely free, which makes it an excellent option for everyone. It’s even more appealing if you’re already using Microsoft Office for most of your schoolwork. OneNote is available as a desktop app and a web app, as well as for Android and iOS.

Bear

Bear is a very easy-to-use yet powerful app that allows you to combine text, photos, to-do lists, and even code snippets if that’s what you do. You can code using Bear because it has a markup editor that supports over 20 programming languages. The app also makes it easy for you to search through all your notes and focus on specific things using triggers such as @task, @tagged, and @files.

Gumnotes

This is a hybrid of notes and reminders. You can use Gumnotes to write notes and attach them to web pages, documents, emails. When accessing the file or website, the written note and attachment emerge as a pop-up, which acts as a sort of reminder. It is pretty much an attempt to create a virtual post-it note.

Windows Sticky Notes

Windows Sticky Notes is just a basic tool. But it gets the job done when you just need to jot down some information or some ideas quickly. You can organize different types of notes by color, and an interesting detail is that Sticky Notes is integrated with Instant Search in Windows, which enables you to find what you are looking for very quickly.

Google Keep

Google Keep is a relatively new note-taking app that's aimed at people who want to capture what's on their mind quickly. It's free, it's colorful and it comes on many Android devices. You can use Google Keep to take notes and create lists, which are stored on Google Drive. Like Evernote, Google Keep also supports image recognition, enabling you to convert images (photos of your notes) and PDFs into searchable text.

Todoist

Todoist encourages you to organize tasks around projects. Individual to-do items live within those projects and can be customized to an exhaustive degree. You can add due dates, recurring reminders, flags, subtasks, and more. Todoist, like Wunderlist, optionally parses your notes for dates using natural language, so a task with the phrase “every three weeks” will be scheduled to recur, as you might expect, every three weeks. The service also features organizational filters by priority and due date.

Boostnote

Boostnote is a free, open source note taking app made for programmers. When you create a new note, you choose either Markdown note, used for creating any kind of text document, or snippet note, which simply gives you a text editor for code. When creating and editing Markdown notes, Boostnote puts an extra panel on the right side of your window to preview the formatting of the note as you write. You can create any kind of notes you want in this note type. Markdown notes even support LaTeX blocks, for those writing hefty mathematical formulas.

Notebook

Notebook is totally free and syncs everything across your account automatically so you always have your notes no matter which device you're using. Create a checklist card for your grocery items, a card for a story you're working on with inline images included throughout the text, a sketch card for some doodling or even an audio card of your voice.

Squid

Squid takes the old-fashioned pen and paper and modernizes it with digital features designed to enhance the note-taking experience. Just use your finger or stylus to handwrite notes just like you would on paper. Similar to Google Keep and Notebook, all your most recent notes will be displayed in a card-like interface for easy access. Every note will have a toolbar at the top, which allows you to customize your ink, duplicate what you've written, resize it, erase mistakes, zoom in or out and so much more. The notes app also allows you to insert PDF files for markup so you can highlight text and insert new pages wherever you want.

MedleyText

MedleyText is very similar to Boostnote, with fewer features but a tighter focus on the features it does have: rich-text formatting, embedded code blocks within normal notes, and customizable keyboard shortcuts. It’s excellent for highly-productive coders with big projects.

Quiver

Quiver is yet another app like the two above: you can mix and match text (in both Markdown and LaTeX formats) with embedded code inside notes. Quiver has a dedicated code editor right inside the app that’s cleaner and more responsive than its competitors. As for syntax highlighting, this app supports over 120 programming languages. Cloud storage sync is available for Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and more. Shared notebooks even allow for collaboration between teammates on large projects.