Pen Selection in Noteshelf
Do you still use paper? Except to endorse some checks I haven’t written on an actual piece of paper for almost 6 weeks. This is aided greatly by the iPad. If I still lived in just a laptop world I don’t think this would be possible. I started eschewing paper by using Penultimate, which was purchased by Evernote on May 7, 2012.
I scribble a lot of things down throughout the day. When I spent most of my time in the same office 5 days a week that was usually on my blotter or a tablet. When you find yourself calling the office and asking someone to try and find a note that you wrote on your desk pad 6 days ago, now surrounded by countless other scribbles, you might have some serious room for improvement in the organizational arena. At my new job, I spend time in both our PA and NJ offices as well as visiting customers with our District Managers. I don’t want to go back to a physical notebook because it is hard to find and reference anything more than a few weeks old.
Penultimate Pen Selection
Enter the iPad, Evernote and handwriting apps. In Penultimate I created notebooks for general notes & scribbles, meetings, ideas for my sailboat project and one for each of my major work initiatives. In a recent post by Jamie Rubin here I learned how to make my own paper templates for Penultimate and the same technique, and actually the same papers, work for Noteshelf. When Penultimate was upgraded and automatically synced each notebook to Evernote automatically, I wasn’t happy. If I wanted my meeting notes in Evernote I wanted them there standalone and tagged individually not as part of a lot of other pages. I saw a reference to Noteshelf on the Linkedin Evernote Group <link>, tried it and am now using it exclusively.
Here’s a table of the major features as I see them:
Feature Comparison
The feature that started me down this path was not being able to choose which pages got synced and where they got synced. I have since found out that there is a way to turn off the auto-sync in Penultimate but it is hidden fairly well.
In Noteshelf you can choose to send the page to Evernote as an image or PDF. I’ll usually have multiple pages of notes for one meeting. I want these all stored in the same note in Evernote. the easiest way to do this in Noteshelf is to send them as a PDF. If you choose image you will end up with multiple notes in EN which you need to manually merge together.
In a future post I’ll show some of the custom papers I’ve created to increase my productivity. Do you use a different handwriting app? Tell us about it in the comments below. Don’t be afraid.
* Number of colors is virtually unlimited as each of the 17 pens can be set to a new color either by picking the color or inputting the color code directly
Just found your site today after seeing a post on Rubin’s site. Really enjoying it.
I agree with your comments concerning Noteshelf and Penultimate. I like the more advanced capabilities of Noteshelf but in my case I do like the auto sync capability of Penultimate. I contacted Noteshelf’s developers and they informed me they are working on adding the auto-sync capability.
I want all of my notes synced as I write them. I’ve had a tendency to forget to upload my Noteshelf notes to Evernote. I prefer automatic.
Jim, Thanks for stopping by and checking things out. Appreciate the comment!
If I could send individual pages or groups of pages and the auto-sync didn’t take much overhead it would be a nice safety net. I no longer have the option to send individual pages to EN as individual notes in Penultimate.
Hopefully Noteshelf will get it right.
Hi Rick,
I’ve been waiting for this post and appreciate your analysis. I was using Noteshelf, switched to Penultimate when Evernote bought it and am back to Noteshelf. On top of the things you have mentioned, I use the highlighter in Noteshelf a lot. It’s not available in Penultimate.
I noticed with the automatic update to Evernote from Penultimate that you have to go back to Penultimate to edit the note, you can’t do it in Evernote and, if you delete the note in Evernote, it also deletes it from Penultimate. Maybe there are settings to change this but, going back to Noteshelf appeared better for me.
John Schneyer
John,
Thanks for stopping by and commenting. For me Noteshelf just has so many more options. I want to get into the wrist protection in another post. Also sometime in the next week or so I’m going to show my custom papers for meeting notes.