Meernotes is an app that tries to mimic the feel of a real paper notebook on your iPhone, and it makes very few concessions in this regard.
Pages
This app takes pages very seriously. The moment you reach the end of a page in Meernotes, you’ll be automatically moved to the next one. This means that this app is much better suited to small notes that fit on a single page, since you won’t be able to copy the contents of several pages without a lot of laborious copying and pasting. It also means that if you edit the previous page, the contents of the next page will not be shifted backwards (like in a Word document).
Like Paper…
Like the paper notebooks that you used to own, Meernotes has no actual text search functionality. Instead, you’ll have to use a set of tabs and titles to navigate between all the pages of your notebook. If you find that your thoughts are getting jumbled together, you’re always free to make a new notebook with a different handwriting style, cover, and index (which only works if you title each of your pages).
Buttons are also few and far between in Meernotes, so you’ll have to get used to gestures to navigate your notebook. Luckily, these gestures are all quite natural, and the animations do a great job of easing you between the different screens.
…Sort Of
The one major concession that Meernotes makes is the inclusion of Dropbox syncing. Unfortunately, it seems that users will have to wait until a Meernotes Mac app is available for this feature to be anything more than a wireless backup. That’s because there are some major limitations to the way you can format your synced files on the Mac side of things, and If you put too many words onto one page, you’ll end up messing up the pages in Meernotes on your iPhone.
A Little Too Analog
Meernotes is a lot of fun to play with, and it looks fantastic, but the app is too caught up in the metaphor of the paper notebook to be of much use to me. When I sit down to write, all I want to do is think about forming words and combining them into paragraphs in the hopes of people telling me how clever I am once I have published something. Having Meernotes split my work into several pages – each one its own Island State – really interrupts my flow. I also don’t think I’ll use Meernotes for keeping quick notes and reminders to myself, since I like having the option of using a text search to find my little micro scribbles.
Conclusion
I may not want to use Meernotes ($2.99) myself, but there’s no denying that this is a lovely and lovingly crafted application for the iPhone. The treatment of paper pages is certainly hard-core, but if you were never the kind of person to wrap your head around how plain text files can simply go on and on and on, then Meernotes could be the right note app for you.
Meernotes was provided by Daniel (the developer) for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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