Evernote – http://www.evernote.com/about/premium/
Evernote is a great note taking program that syncs your notes across multiple devices including iPad, Mac, Windows, iPhone/iPod, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. The idea is to be able to create any kind of multimedia note and post it to your notebook at any time. If you can’t access it through the program, they also have a web interface that works well and the whole system functions similar to Dropbox. The free version allows up to 40MB/month of uploads unlimited notes. If you upgrade to Premium ($5/month or $45/yr) you get 500MB of uploads of any file type.
Pros: What I like about this program is that it works on all my devices – I can type my notes in plaintext while in lecture and come home to find them synced to any other device. If Evernote isn’t installed, I can still access my notes via the web. What’s also great is that I can tag my notes and organize them by notebook, making things easy to find.
For those of you with iPhones, you can take pictures and record voice notes to be uploaded directly into Evernote. I love the fact that I can email out any note or several notes at once whenever I want. The desktop versions are robust and work very well. Premium accounts are fairly inexpensive.Earlier, I emailed lecture notes to myself and uploaded the PDF files onto Google Groups, if you’d like to check it out.
Con: The 40MB limit is small considering that our PDF files for Proteins are nearly 10MB each (I accidentally used half my monthly cap on the first day). I’ve circumvented this by pairing the service with my Dropbox account. Uploading PDF works well, but you can’t write directly onto slides and they’re appended like email attachments. The iPad version only supports basic text editing and I’ve noticed a few minor formatting errors when editing between desktop and iPad versions. I’ve found simple fixes for this but I’l leave it out of the discussion for now.
Dropbox – https://www.dropbox.com/features
Dropbox is a file syncing service with a similar structure to Evernote. The application works on almost any platform (even Linux!) and can sync a common folder across many devices. If your device isn’t supported, you can access your files through the web. As Raja noted, this works really well when we receive our lecture notes – I can upload it through the web from any computer and it should show up on my iPad/desktop/laptop/phone almost immediately.
The free account starts with 2GB of storage. You can upgrade to 50GB of storage for $10/month or 100GB of storage for $20/month if you’re a pirate.
Pros: It’s FREE and works really well. The iPad version allows PDF viewing so you don’t have to fuddle with iBooks and sync through your computer. It circumvents a lot of problems with the iPad and it’s the only thing I could find that plays well with my Linux laptop.
Cons: None so far.
Lastly, I’ll explained how I setup my notetaking system:
1. Take lecture notes in plaintext using the iPad.
2. Review, format, and edit notes at home on my desktop with the slideshow open in another window
3. Keep lecture files stored in Dropbox in case I need to reference them.
4. Share finalized notes with the class.