From that random idea that needs to be jotted down, to making complex notes and mind maps, in today’s day and age, it’s better to stick to a note taking application, rather than relying on physical pen and paper.
In our previous article, we saw some of the best note taking apps for Windows, and in this one, we have got you covered with our list of the best note taking apps for Mac.
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Best Note Taking Apps for Mac
1. Apple Notes
The stock Notes app that comes with Mac OS itself, is actually not that bad. It comes with basic note taking functionalities like formatting, lists, checkboxes, drag and dropping pictures/files. While it doesn’t offer anything out of the box, where Apple Notes shines is how fast it is to open and get started with a new note. Also it syncs immediately and effortlessly with the Notes app on your iPhone and iPad. We highly suggest you first checking out this app which already comes with your Mac, before buying or installing another note taking app.
Pros: – Very fast and simple to use – Comes pre-installed – Sync with notes app on iPhone and iPad
Cons: – Not ideal for handwritten notes or drawings – No charts, graph support – Works only within the Apple Ecosystem
Bottom Line: If you are someone who needs to take notes on your computer very rarely, might be for a grocery list or quick information, you’ll get by easily using the stock Notes app. Apple Notes does offer all the basic functionalities you might need and best of all, you don’t even need to install another app.
Price: Free
Link: Use Apple Notes on iCloud here
2. Evernote
Chances are you have heard of Evernote, as it is one of the most popular note taking apps available on almost all platforms. Evernote offers some great ways to keep all your notes perfectly organised. You start off your note by creating/selecting a particular notebook and all your notes are kept organised in these notebooks. You also have a tags to classify all your stuff, and it basically works like a File Cabinet.
In terms of features, it is a beast and it has almost any and every feature you’d want in a note taking app including pie charts and bar graphs to searching text in a picture. We also strongly recommend trying Evernote with its Web-clipper companion which makes taking notes/clips form the web so easy, you can never go back. But all this does come at a price, which makes Evernote a little on the bulkier and slower side.
Pros: – Feature packed to the brim – Available on all platforms – Easy organisation of notes
Cons: – Heavy app and takes time to start up – Costly
Read: Don’t Like Their New Pricing, Try These 8 Best Free Evernote Alternatives
Bottom Line: Well, if you are someone who has to take loads of notes and are also looking to keep them organised in the best way possible, Evernote is a really good investment.
Unclutter is a neat tool which can increase your productivity by many folds. The app works almost like Sticky Notes; you can access it very quickly from any window you are working on. Just go to the top of your screen and scroll down, Unclutter should appear with its three windows: the first being the Clipboard, second being Files and the last being the Notes section.
Creating a note is pretty fast, just make Unclutter appear and start with your new note or even copy directly from the clipboard or even a file. Click on the ‘+’ to take another note and you can also see all your notes or search through them.
But do keep in mind that the notes you can take are pretty limited to text only and the absence of formatting and checkbox lists might be. Ideal breaker for some.
Pros: – Easy access, one swipe away – Pretty fast – Comes with a Clipboard as well as a file holder
Cons: – Supports only text notes – No organisation – No sync, only on Mac OS
Bottom Line: Unclutter is a very cool app where you can take notes in a jiffy, so we’d recommend this app for someone who is looking to take some quick text notes while working on their computer and doesn’t need any fancy formatting or feature.
Price: $9.99 (Free Trial available)
Link: Get Unclutter here
4. BoostNote
Next on our list, we have a note taking app specifically designed for programmers. BoostNote started out as a open source project and has gained a lot of popularity among the programming community over the years.
What this app basically allows you to do is store your code or code snippets as notes. You can access quickly or even take notes in markdown. Once you open the app, you can select if you want to create a markdown note or create a code snippet. And when I said it is meant for developers, I meant it. BoostNote supports code syntax highlighting in more than a hundred languages and it is also very easy to keep all your notes organised.
Pros: – Supports markdown notes – Code highlighting – Plenty of syntax and UI themes – Open source – Available on all platforms
Cons: – Bulky – Takes time to startup
Bottom Line: Well the answer is obvious, this app is a blessing for programmers as they can now manage all their code snippets and keep them organised while also not losing on the ability to take notes in markdown.
Price: Free
Link: Download Boostnote from here
5. OneNote
OneNote is a full blown note taking application from Microsoft, which has been here for a while now. And over all these years, it feels like Microsoft has almost perfected the note-taking experience.
What separates OneNote its competitors is that it using the app feels very close to taking notes on a real notebook; you can write, draw, add pictures literally anywhere on the page at any orientation, just like on a paper notebook. It also comes with a ton of features, the biggest selling point would be built in OCR reader. While you can get it for free for almost all platforms, the Mac app is huge in size and a little slow to use.
Bottom Line: If you are invested even a little in the Microsoft space, OneNote is a no brainer and even if you are not and looking for a great digital notebook, OneNote won’t disappoint.
Price: Free
Link: OneNote is available here
6. Notability
Notability is our pick as the best note taking app for students. It works exceptionally well with the Apple Pencil on the iPad to create beautiful hand-written notes and sketches. You can rotate, scale, and recolour your ideas and sketches until your notes are just how you want them. You can even markup photos and annotate PDFs and once you’re done you can easily share them through Airdrop or any other storage service.
Notability keeps all your notes neatly organised and also syncs them up between your iPad, iPhone and Mac, so you can access them anytime anywhere.
Pros: – Great for hand-written notes and sketches – Support for pressure sensitive strokes of the Apple Pencil
Cons: – No search tags – No support for shapes – Pricey
Bottom Line: If you have an iPad which you use to take or sketch notes, Notability works really well with the Apple Pencil and if you have the money to spend, just go for it.
A great alternative to Notability would be ZoomNotes which comes at a lower price, but offers almost all the features of Notability.
Price: $9.99
Link: Buy Notability from here
7. Journey
The next app on our list is Journey, which takes maintaining your daily notes to a whole new level. While Journey is aimed more to be a digital journal, you can still use the feature-packed text editor to take quick notes and Journey will keep them ordered by the date. You can also search through all your notes and even view them by locations. The app backs up and syncs all your notes using Google Drive and it should be imperative to say, it also does provide impressive security features to protect your privacy.
Pros: – Keeps everything organised like a Diary – Easy note taking – Streamlined review of your notes
Bottom Line: Journey works best for noting down your everyday goals or writing something about your day. If you are looking to make the switch from a physical diary to a digital one, Journey might be your best bet.
Price: $16.99
Link: Download Journey from here
8. Manuscripts
With all the normal note taking apps or text editors, it gets really hard to note down or represent scientific equations, derivatives and mathematical graphs. Enter Manuscripts, a free note taking app made for scientists and scholarly writing. Describing it as just a note taking app would be an understatement as it is capable of much more from a writing a research article to penning down a book. There are various templates which you can choose from and a plethora of import and export options including LaTeX.
Pros: – Scientific Notes/Writing – Solid import and export formats – Citation and bibliography formatting
Cons: – Not quick for taking simple notes
Bottom Line: Manuscripts is a capable and powerful app for when the going gets tough. Of course, it isn’t for the average Joe, but rather for taking scientific notes with equations and graphs. If you are looking for more of a digital laboratory notebook with support for experiment templates along with equations and graphs, check out Findings.
Price: Free
Link: Ger Manuscripts here
9. iThoughtsX
Last but definitely not least, we have iThoughtsX, a mind mapping tool that lets you organise your thoughts and at a glance see the whole project. Mind maps are ideal for brainstorming with means of keeping your ideas structured and nothing gets omitted out in the whole process. Although it has a steep learning curve, it’s really easy once you get the hold of it. There are multiple templates and layouts from which you can start and there’s an impressive amount of built-in icons and clipart images.
Pros: – Create perfect mind maps for summarising and meeting notes – Task Management – Hand-off feature(Start your min map on one device and finish on another device)
Cons: – Steep learning curve – Not good for other kind of notes
Bottom Line: Mind maps are especially useful for managers and developers or anyone managing a large project. So if you know you need to create mind maps, this app is for you.
Price: $49.99
Link: Get iThoughtsX here
Wrapping Up: Best Note Taking Apps for Mac
We believe that there is an app for everyone with their own particular need. So whether you are a student or programmer or businessman, we really hope that you could find at least one note taking app from this list suitable to your own needs. And that concludes our list of the top note taking applications available for the Mac. Don’t forget to connect with us and tell us your favourite app from the list or if we missed yours.
Sticky notes may look like they belong to the Windows 7 era but they are still a favorite among many users. So much so that Microsoft has retained them even in Windows 10. But sadly it hasn’t got any new features or upgrades. Today if someone wants an alternative, most people recommend switching over to Evernote, OneNote or Keep.
While all these are much better, they don’t offer the main functionality of sticky notes i.e. pinning them to the desktop. Stickies, developed by Zhorn Software, is just the right alternative to Sticky Notes. It is filled to the brim with features, is more robust and offers deep customization. Let’s check these out in detail.
Did you know? The physical post-it notes, from which the sticky notes are inspired, were invented by mistake and for the first few years nobody saw any use for them.
Download Stickies
Download Stickies from here and install it.
Adding a Sticky
Adding a new note or sticky, is as simple as double clicking the stickies icon on the taskbar tray. You can change this to single click by going to Settings > General tab and checking the Create a new sticky with single tasktray icon click option.
By default, a new sticky is of plain text type. You can select making a new sticky from the clipboard, screenshot or screen area, by right clicking the stickies icon in the task tray. The screenshot & screen area stickies have drawing and annotation tools built right in, accessed by a right-click. You can also open a plain image sticky by checking the New stickies are image stickies option in Settings > General tab.
Go Really Nuts on Customizing
Customization is the true strength of Stickies over the default app. The visual style and behavior can be tweaked with plenty of options at your disposal. We will start with the visual part.
Appearance
Most of the settings for customizing the looks are available in the Appearance tab in Settings. The various options are changing font style, font color, background color and sticky width.
Other options are toggling shadow and opacity. In the General tab, you can also set the height & width for new stickies. For more in-depth tweaking there is a Skin designer with tutorial here.
Display Options
This pertains to how the stickies are displayed on your desktop. They can be rolled (hidden)-unrolled, set on top and attached with certain windows. Attaching a sticky to an app (window) will launch it when the corresponding app or program is launched. To attach a sticky, right-click on the title bar of sticky and select Attach.
Next is you can set a sticky to appear/disappear based on time and also set an alarm. This can be accessed by right-clicking a particular sticky and choosing either Sleep or Alarm.
Grouping Stickies
You can group several stickies together in stacks, which have their own set of customization options. To create and manage stacks, right-click on Stickies icon in task tray and click on Manage Stickies.
In the new window, you can click on Files > New Stack, to create a new stack. The stack again has its own customization options which can be accessed by right-clicking it.
Miscellaneous Options
Email & Networking
Stickies can be sent to others through email or on LAN. For the former you need to enable Email from Settings > Email tab and need to provide the email address and STMP or MAPI server address.
For the latter other sticky PCs need to be on the same network and obviously have stickies installed. The developer even has a Sticky sever app for the purpose.
Hotkeys & Advanced settings
What key combinations launch a new sticky can be configured from Settings > Hotkeys tab.
Where the stickies are stored can be changed by again right-clicking the icon and selecting Move data location... Custom save location is a plus point as it can be used to sync stickies data across two PCs using any cloud service. One can also directly search on Google, Bing and Yahoo, by selecting the search term (text) from any note >right-click > select Search Engine. More search sites can be added by going to Settings > Advanced tab.
Importing Stickies
If you have a large number of sticky notes from the default app, no copy-pasting individual notes is needed. The developer has a Sticky Importer tool which imports them for you.
Apart from all the above, there are many more options which you can discover by playing around with the settings menu. Most of them are self-explanatory and easy to understand. Additionally, to complement the Stickies there are a bunch of tools available from the developer, like the aforementioned Sticky server, Sticky Importer and more which can be found here.
Cool Tip: Mac users need not worry, you too can add sticky notes to your dashboard. Plus there is also the option of Apple Notes.
Sticking to Conclusion
We don’t often see such an app which offers so many features and that too free. Zhorn Software, the developers of this app have done an excellent job. And as usual, do share your thoughts with us through comments, we would love to hear from you.
SEE ALSO:How to Transfer Notes from Google Keep to Google Docs on Web or Mobile
Also See#notes #productivity
Did You Know
You can switch manually to the tablet mode in Windows 10.