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Comment by king_magic | Hacker News Reader

I think this is really quite neat. I used to be a heavy user of Evernote, but I found it difficult to reconcile my handwritten notes (90% of my notes at work) with what I'd have in Evernote. As a result, I stopped using Evernote. I always hoped I'd be able to find a good way to record my notes digitally (e.g., iPad + stylus), but at the end of the day, taking notes with pen & paper always wins for me.

This could very well bring me back to Evernote. Not sure if it's worth $24+, but if it works, maybe... I do take an awful lot of handwritten notes, and I'd love to digitize them easily.

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I don't know how it is today, but OneNote on tablet pc was doing pretty fantastic search of handwritten notes in ~2004 (back when I last used it). When I worked at MSFT, I took basically all of my notes in it.

Seconded -- OneNote was/is an amazing piece of software. I took all my notes for the CFA on it in 2008, and I used it to great effect apartment hunting off craigslist that year as well. My tablet died a couple of years ago and I haven't replaced it, or I'd probably still be using OneNote.

I've used a tablet PC for years. OneNote is truly powerful software. I pray for a convertible ultrabook. Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one. So much hate for the lowly tablet PC.

Asus has a convertible ultrabook coming out sometime [1]. Too bad it looks like its just capacitive touch, no digitizer =/. Wish Lenovo would find a way to thin out their X200T's.

[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/5897/new-asus-transformer-book...

With OneNote in mind and being a Tablet PC user myself, I'm really baffled by the decision to make handwriting available only on x86 Surface version. There's really nothing that would've prevented ARM version of Surface to become a killer OneNote host...

Since they are doing recognition of stickers, isn't it also possible for you to invent your own 'tag' and train Evernote to recognise it? Then they could charge for the app and you won't be stuck with recurring sticker purchases.

Or just "pirate" them yourself with some colored sticker paper.

I don't know why you should need stickers at all - just have some unique symbol you can draw, train evernote on the symbol and get rid of the stickers all together. It can't be that hard to do if you train it on your own symbol, as opposed to trying to learn to copy one or whatever.

>just have some unique symbol you can draw

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. And if you draw the same thing every day you get pretty good at keeping it consistent.

I got one of the pre-release notebooks at the Evernote Conference yesterday. You can reset what tags the stickers correspond with in the desktop and mobile apps.

What's your opinion of Livescribe?

I'm also a paper note taker but I don't see myself moving to Livescribe (though I haven't tried it) or taking photos of pages in Evernote. I'm pretty organized, though, so I'm not dying to have everything digitized.

I used a Livescribe pen as a student, and I found it really helpful. Being able to record audio and tie that to the words I was writing was incredibly useful. I also appreciated that they didn't go with the price-gouging printer/razorblade-refill model, because they allow you to print your own paper for free (as long as you have a high-quality printer).

The only thing I didn't like about the pen was that it was ballpoint - I'm oddly particular about this; I like Uniball or fountain pens, and I find ballpoint pens a bit irritating to write with.

But other than that, I didn't have any complaints with the pen - if you're like most people and don't mind using ballpoint pens, you probably won't mind the pen either.

The concept sounds great, and the technology works really well. But, having just used it for the last couple months, the ballpoint pen is so bad that it instantly degrades your handwriting. My notes may now be digital, but I can't understand them.

I bought a Livescribe Echo smartpen two years ago and only used it one or two times, including going through the tutorials. It is definitely a very neat technology demo, but my interest was as a developer. I wanted to be able to use the pens as an input device for applications on my Android phone. Unfortunately, this was pretty much impossible with the Echo pen because there is no built-in bluetooth so I gradually lost interest. It was a terrible lost opportunity for Livescribe since I can only imagine the applications one could build with Livescribe and an smartphone; they just seem to go well together.

I used livescribe back in 2009 or so. Hated the big pen. Till date nothing compares to taking notes on a normal paper and a pen/pencil. Even the S-note on the galaxy note/tab is a far cry.

I found the huge pen rather clunky, and the spiral bound notebooks really frustrating. Their software is also rather pitiful compared to Evernote.

There's a livescribe->evernote bridge, though, isn't there?

Yes, there is, last I recall.

It's worth it to me (#623). I use Evernote pretty heavily, but there are times where paper wins out (i.e. dead batteries and meetings where being on a phone/tablet could be frowned upon).

What I also enjoy about this idea is that it is like a physical version of Paper By 53. Although now instead of emailing Evernote my sketches via paper I can now snap a picture from Evernote itself. Seems like an interesting product tie-in that has me wanting it more than I want money.

I'm still hoping for a good stylus solution for tablets. Fingers are a great primary input device but when I'm taking notes, or some other writing/drawing activity, something that works like a pen is much preferred.

I bought a stylus marketed specifically for the ipad and it sucked. The tip was this big soft spongy foam thing. It was nowhere close to the immediate, reliable experience of putting pen to paper. I was left assuming that the current capacitive technology in these devices is just not up to the task of making pen input work well.

Maybe it can be done easily, but it just wasn't high enough on the priority queue. Maybe Microsoft will do this well with Surface, since it would differentiate them and after all, they were doing tablets with pen input over a decade ago.

Whatever the holdup, I'm still looking forward to tablets that are as easy to write on as pen and paper.

It's expensive, but consider the Jot Touch stylus:

http://adonit.net/product/jot-touch/

Now that Evernote has acquired PenUltimate (handwriting app), I think you'll see some really good integration on the iPad where you can use the stylus to write your notes, and it will end up in Evernote automatically.

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/25868-news-penultimate-...

Just bought, order #263. Pretty brisk sales considering it's a pre-order.

#375 here, less than half an hour later.

503

601

#654

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

#175739 got mine from moleskin, evernote's store really sucks, couldn't purchase it there ;/ Why they felt the need to setup a crappy store instead of just letting other retailers sell it is beyond me.

#739155813

Now I wish Devonthink Pro had a feature like this. I've been using paper notebooks for years—this: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/design-y-notebook-... discusses a recent example—and like you I find the reconciliation process difficult too. But at the same time, I find that I'm in a different "state" when I write on paper, and that's not a state I'm willing to give up without a good replacement.

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