Academic Note Taking Software Mac

1. Note Taking Software Mac
2. Academic Note Taking Software Mac Update
3. Academic Note Taking Software Mac Download

College is a heady time. New places, new friends and new beginnings come with new challenges. Despite (or perhaps because of) excessive warnings about how “different” college will be from educators and parents, new college students are often overwhelmed by the new expectations. If you don’t want to succumb to stress, you’ll need some apps to help keep things organized. Taking notes effectively is a crucial part of succeeding in college. And depending on your professors’ teaching style, you may need to take rapid-fire notes from lectured material. If you want to keep up, you can either learn shorthand or keep digital notes. Most of us type faster than we write (or think, in some cases) so you can stay up to speed easily. Once you’ve settled on taking notes digitally, you’ll need to find the best app. While Apple’s Notes is okay for quick lists or doodles, if you’ve got a Pencil, it’s not powerful enough to organize lecture notes. Here are the contenders for the best note-taking apps for college students on the Mac.

Evernote

There’s a ton of note-taking apps for college students out there, but Evernote is by far the best. It should be no surprise that it’s included in this list. It’s accessible, flexible and versatile, with powerful organizational options and deep third-party support. It offers the most reliable sync, PDF annotation, and support for a wide range of document types. Text styling isn’t as expressive as it could be, but the use case is more about collecting and organizing content from a ton of different places. Using the Web Clipper extension, you can grab content from JSTOR, Wikipedia, Google Scholar and more, then annotate your clips in Evernote. This feature alone is a godsend when you’re doing a ton of digital research, and it far surpasses the utility of Pocket or another read-it-later service. You can sync between two devices for free (Mac and iPhone, for example) or pay a few bucks a month to sync to unlimited devices. If you have a few extra dollars, it’s well worth the fee.

Jul 12, 2017  And, these smart filters also sync between Mac and iOS versions. My biggest quibble with Ulysses right now as a note-taking, researching tool is the way it handles inline images. If the image is inline with a note, you see an IMG markdown tag. Or, an image can be attached to a note, but otherwise not shown inline. Editor's note: This article was updated on at 4:45 PM PST to highlight Notability's new app for the Mac and to correct a typo. Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in.

Note Taking Software Mac

OneNote

If you don’t love Evernote, OneNote is an absolutely great alternative. If you’ve already got Office for Mac, OneNote is included in your subscription. It features many more formatting options that Evernote, but the design concept is a little different. It’s heavily optimized towards typing notes, rather than collecting information from a wide variety of sources. You can still include images, graphs and PDFs in your notebooks, but that function isn’t as integrated as Evernote. Essentially, OneNote is a different graphical interface for Word, designed to expose more organizational features. If you like Word, you’ll love OneNote. Users that want to recreate the flexibility of a spiral notebook will be pleased with the expanding formatting options, but we’ve never found typing in Word to be that delightful. If you already have an Office subscription, give it a try: you’ll probably find something you like about it!

Bear

Bear is designed to make note-taking beautiful. It relies on plain text MarkDown formatting, applying roughly the same range of formatting options that Evernote allows. Notes are organized into collections based on hashtags, so there are no notebooks to be created and organized. It’s more like a flexible tagging structure. The app is definitely built for simple note-taking, and doesn’t have as many organizational features as Evernote or OneNote. Depending on how you feel about those apps, that might be a turnoff, or it might be appealing. There’s limited support for adding pictures and files to Bear, but you won’t have the in-place annotation tools you get from Evernote.

Simplenote

Simplenote is a cross platform, plain text note taking app that’s much beloved by minimalists. If you want to keep your note taking really simple, then Simplenote will be perfect for you. The simple, clean layout is a joy to use, and it’s free of distracting formatting features. However, it lacks a lot of the secondary features that make Evernote and OneNote so powerful. Of course, if you’re dedicated, you can take create text-only formatting to organize your notes. Multi-platform sync is great for folks with a ton of devices. And if you need to take notes on the fly, you’ll find the fast mobile app useful for quickly capturing inspiration. But if you need something that can collect input from a wide variety of sources, you’re better off looking at Evernote.

nvALT

nvALT is built for Notational Velocity, a note-taking platform designed for lightning fast, keyboard-only operation. Its perfect use case is during a phone call. When you want to write something down quickly, you tap the key command, which reveals nvALT from the menu bar. Then, you start typing, and the note is saved immediately. You don’t need to title it, tag it or do anything else. While it’s amazing for that use, it doesn’t provide the broad use that other apps offer, so it might be a little limiting as a note-taking app for college students.

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For the past few months I have been researching some research apps…

On our sister site, The Focus Course, I recently wrote an article detailing my process for how I build my own, alternate index of notes and ideas when reading a book.

You can get much more detail in the link above, but in a nut, an alternate index is no more than something you list out in the back of the book you’re reading that you create and update as you read through the book. It’s a list you create in real time that is comprised of the book’s themes and topics that most resonate with you, as well as the pages that have the best quotes and ideas around those topics.

Within that article, I dropped in a brief aside about my desire to begin organizing the notes, highlights, and takeaways from the books I read into a digital database of sorts. As such, I’ve been looking at different research apps to find just the right one.

I’ve been writing for a living since 2011, and despite my greatest fears, I’ve never had a shortage of ideas. For nearly a decade all of my ideas and notes have been kept in Simplenote, but for the past year or so I’ve been wanting a system that is just a little bit more complex than what I’m currently using.

In short, what I’m looking for is something to store all of the ideas, bits of inspiration, notes, quotes, takeaways from the books I read, and more. (Something akin to Ryan Holliday’s notecard system — but digital.)

Since I’m already creating an alternate index of ideas in the back of each book I read, what I’d like to do is create a digital and universally-searchable version of that index: a single repository to organize, sort, and search all my highlights and notes.

As you can imagine, there are a LOT of notes and research apps out there that do this. The issue wasn’t finding an app that was capable — it was finding an app that works for me and my workflows.

I want to do more than simply jot down my ideas and notes. I also want to have them compiled and structured (rather than a giant list sorted only by modification date), but not wholly cut off from one another.

And I also want some pretty fancy search capabilities. For instance, I’d love the ability to bring up all the highlights related to “focus” from all books I’ve read. Or, perhaps, to view my notes and highlights related to “time management,” but only from those books that are about entrepreneurship, and then compare those same notes and highlights against books that are only about creativity.

That said, here are a few of my initial thoughts on some of the different notes and research apps out there today.

• Simplenote: This is the app I’ve been using for idea capture and other miscellaneous note taking since it shipped nearly a decade ago. I love how easy it is to use, how — ahem — simple it is, and how reliable the sync is. But for my current use-case, I’m looking for something that can handle images and has a more robust folder structure beyond just tags.

• Bear: If you haven’t tried out Bear, you really should (Mac / iOS). It’s spectacular (and may even replace Simplenote for me). You can insert photos into notes in Bear, but otherwise it’s still pretty simple. That’s not a knock against the app — it is simple by design. But that means that, for my needs in this case, it’s too simple to be my go-to research app.

• Day One: This app is one of my all-time favorites, but, as with the aforementioned apps, Day One is not built for what I need in this scenario.

• Apple’s Notes App: There is a lot to love about the Notes app (and even more once iOS 11 ships). You can drop all sorts of cool things into a note, and even draw and sketch, and more. But the search and sort functionality within Notes is not quite what I’m looking for.

• Evernote: I love the power of Evernote and its strong emphasis on making idea capture as easy as possible, but I don’t love the way it ruins the formatting of my text and the way all my content is a silo inside the app. There are many, many smart folks who use Evernote, but so far, for me, it still just doesn’t feel right.

• Together: An alternative to Evernote, Together is a pretty classy app. But, at least so far in my experience, the process of getting information into the app is far too tedious, as is the process for properly tagging that information. I may just need to spend more time learning the app, but if something isn’t easy to use then I know from experience that I won’t use it.

• Other Apps: There is also Microsoft OneNote, Scrivener, plain text files with nvALT, DEVONthink, Papers, and probably a few others. Some of these simply don’t appeal to me, and some of them I haven’t yet tried out.

Ulysses (My Pick)

I’ve been using Ulysses for quite a long time, but only as a writing app — not for collecting notes and other tidbits related to research.

Ulysses is a fantastic app, and it does a great job at simplifying it’s vast complexity. However, I didn’t initially consider it for my researching needs because I didn’t think it had a robust search engine. But, turns out, I was wrong.

Thanks to a new project we’re working on here at The Sweet Setup, I just discovered the Smart Filters in Ulysses, and whoa. These filters are basically smart folders. You can create all sorts of variables for how you want sheets to be filtered, and you can even move the filters around within different groups so as to bring up different results based on the group.

For example, here’s a filter I set up to search within all my book quotes for any notes that contain the keywords “business” and “creativity.”

And here’s a filter I set up that shows me any and all notes I’ve created or worked on within the past 48 hours.

Input and Organization Within Research Apps

Academic Note Taking Software Mac Update

The two things that matter most to in my use of notes and research apps are: (1) ease of input and (2) powerful search and categorization. It seems that many apps excel at one or the other, but not both.

It’s also critical that these research apps be full-featured on both Mac and iOS.

That’s why Ulysses smart filters are so exciting to me. You can get more complex than what I’ve shown above. You can include parameters that search the entire text of a note (not just the keywords/tags), and you can also include “negative” search parameters that exclude notes with certain words. And, these smart filters also sync between Mac and iOS versions.

My biggest quibble with Ulysses right now as a note-taking, researching tool is the way it handles inline images. If the image is inline with a note, you see an IMG markdown tag. Or, an image can be attached to a note, but otherwise not shown inline. It’d be great to be able to have images displayed inline.

Academic Note Taking Software Mac Download

Though, I do like how you can attach images to a note (if you want an image / screenshot nearby as reference material, but perhaps not as something you want to be in-line with your actual text).

So, all that said, I’m obviously now using Ulysses (Mac / iOS) as my writing and researching app of choice, and I’ve already begun transcribing all my book notes and highlights into the app.

And, as I mentioned, we’ve got something brand new related to Ulysses in the works. Click here to find out more.

Stop losing your ideas and notes to multiple apps…

An online course to help you save time, organize your notes, and master the best writing app for Mac and iOS: Ulysses.