I’ve been using Notability for the past few years and love it. Being able to upload PPT and PDF decks for meetings and then take notes on my ipad has been a game changer for productivity. I can review documents - mark them up - and then send the notes directly back to my team. Except for a (very) slight delay sometimes between my Mac and my ipad, everything was seamless. I recommended Notability to everyone. However, the latest release of Notability for Mac is a disaster. It crashes often. When it isn’t crashing it’s nearly impossible to use. Trying to drag notes from one folder to another is incredibly frustrating - difficult to accomplish and takes a ton of time to get it to work. Often I can’t seem to drag and drop except on the fourth or fifth try. Imagine if your mouse pointer only worked about 25% of the time. Also - I used to be able to “print to Notability” directly from PPT (incredibly useful for quick uploads) and that feature is gone. And uploading a folder from Finder by dragging it over to Notability is frustrating - super laggy, often results in the “spinning wheel of death”, or just crashes the app. I would go back to the previous version is a hot second if I could. It’s so annoying that I’ve even considered moving to a different notes system - although I really don’t want to do that.I love Notabilty and the ipad version works great. But I need my full Notability ecosystem to work well together. Like it used to.

I love this app, I’ve been using it for a few years and it’s the only app I’ve ever left a written review on because I just think that it is such a good app and deserves a good review. I love that there are templates that let me take unique notes and that I can organize everything. There’s so many useful features like the math conversion and the learn features. I like that I can easily import documents and large files to directly annotate and take notes, it is super easy to do and doesn’t take a long time to load the imported files. It’s really useful to be able to access my notes across devices and without internet as well so I can review anywhere any time. One thing I hope to see from this app in the future is an expansion on the AI Learn features, there is so much potential for this feature. A few suggestions, it would be nice to be able to easily access the material generated by learn in one separate area instead of having to open each not individually. Perhaps a separate section that contains all the generated Learn materials from the individual notes so you can easily view and access them. Furthermore I would love more options of study features similar to those of apps like Quizlet or Knowt, that way instead of exporting the AI generated material to a different app everything could be done on Notability. The Learn feature has so much potential and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I highly recommend this app.

I have used this app for over 3 years at the time I wrote this review. I used it everyday and have nearly 1000 separate articles and notes within it. I am at the end of my doctorate and have found that I nearly live out of my iPad and mostly this app. I average between 4-6 hours a day in the app. I have helped many people to come to use this app in their daily lives. I prepare my lectures, classwork, attendance, and nearly anything else I would otherwise put on paper all through Notability. If you have an iPad and an Apple Pencil, then Notability is a great contributor to success. I want to help the makers of Notability for the development and a continued improvement of this wonderful app that I bought the yearly subscription and I don’t even use the stuff in it. That is not because the stuff in there is not good, rather it is well made, I am just stuck in my ways of how I use the app. Lastly, I would like to thank the developers of Notability, as I am so grateful for their hard work and intuitive improvements. Keep up the great work and I will continue to use this app al long as iOS supports it.***April 2023 update*** This app is still the best app I’ve ever used. I’ve got so many people to use it, and I use it every day. It is the most useful iPad app ever! I plan on continuing to use it, and definitely, and I am amazed by how many awesome updates and things that keep adding to it, great job Notability! Keeping innovating!!!

I’ve been using Notability since college and now I use it for my personal and professional life. Most importantly, I’ve come to rely on it for therapy - where I don’t have to ‘think’ in the general sense. Of course, I’m challenged to think and talk through issues, but that’s where notability comes in. I can give 100% of my focus to each session and draw placeholders on the screen when something enlightening, challenging, etc. - is discussed during recording. My therapist no longer needs to wait as I take notes - I’m a very slow writer - resulting in far more dialogue each session. Later, I’ll review placeholders with the benefit of experiencing the tone of how and why something was said. It’s phenomenal.May I request the addition of a zoom percentage feature to the main notepad screen? When writing, my ‘ink’ can be too thick or too thin making it difficult to maintain the same level of penmanship continuity, regardless of the different pen sizes. I know this is nit picky, but having clean notes to start each day makes for a productive day. A percentage feature would save time and a little frustration trying to match cleanliness of previous notes. We’ve all been there when looking back at notes saying, “I really like how I wrote that! It started me off on the right foot and really made for a productive day.” It’s truly self-motivating.Thanks for creating Notability. It has been life changing.

I love the app it is almost everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m very happy with the usability of it in comparison to other note taking apps. I’m not a fan of the subscription model I would rather pay an obscene price one time instead of having an app potentially affect me in the future. My advice is to throw in a lifetime deal for like $50. People could complain but at least they’d have the option. Two features that I would love to see come to the app is to be able to pin audio to a page visually, with a play button and a slider. I use this app for creating story boards and if I can have audio cue in correlation to my my scene breakdowns; I would make more practical use of the audio player. The second feature that I would like to see, is a lasso tool for images. Or an eraser for images. when I create a scene I want to be able to take a picture of my scenes and props and arrange them within the app. The Apple Pencil support is BEAUTIFUL! It would be nice to get some smudging features and paint for it. I would like the option to highlight over pictures as well so I’m able to simulate lighting on my subjects. GIF’s. This is definitely more than two things 😅 but currently AS IS Notability is a complete product is worthy of its asking price. However I feel that if those few tweaks were added it would be worth even more and it wouldn’t be debated.

I need to produce about 1000 well-organized words for my editor each week. When I am at home, I can use my iMac. But we travel much of the year. During the time on the road I rely on Notability. Although I have an older iPad and can't use the split screen, I can take advantage of Notabilities Web clips that can be lined up nicely along one side of the paper I am working on...keeping my notes easily available. Better yet, Notability handles the complex notes like a champ...no slowdown in typing, etc. The app is also aces in with a first-rate filing system...I do many versions before I get my 1000 and I can keep the versions together by putting them in the week's subject. I have been using Notability since it came out and find that it has gotten better with each new version. My hard-earned pennies were well-invested in this app. My desiderata: word count and the ability to add space to the lines...It's easier to edit when text is double-spaced. I could use Pages which has both of these but I like how Notability feels as I write....the text comes out smoothly; Pages doesn't have web clipping or the nice filing system. There are LOTS of note taking apps but I find Notability to be really great....I actually can get stuff done with it.Ok, here’s a suggestion. I would like to be able to popup a notability note while I am in another app—

Something that I really liked about notability was the simple and intuitive layout. This made it really easy for me to organize my notes and help me maintain order with my notes. Another thing that I really liked was all of the new updates that really helped with making things run more smoothly (i.e. the favorites bar, being able to search for key words within the notes themselves instead of just the title, and the magnifying glass). Some areas of improvement would be being able to adjust the shape of the magnifying box because there are sometimes when I’m trying to edit a specific place and the magnifying box just doesn’t fit right. Another thing would be to be able to open more than two notes at once. This would come in handy for those to do notes simultaneously on multiple sections. It would also be cool if when your in portrait mode for the notes you have the option to be able to stack the notes top of one another instead of seeing them side. Then one last area of adjustment would be to be able to have a bookmarked notes bar like how there is a bookmarked pages (within each notes) bar. It would make jumping between two desired note documents a little bit easier.Anyways, that’s it from me. Thank you for making a really great app. Totally looking foreword to what’s in store for the future of this app.

I was using OneNote on a Surface tablet until the digitizer stopped working. I decided to try using an iPad Pro instead, since they’re lighter. Notability was the only app to offer most of the same functionality as OneNote on a Windows tablet. There are many things that I prefer about Notability, but there are a few issues that prevent me from giving it more stars: first, I would like the ability to create a group of commonly used highlighters/pens for marking up documents. I have a system of using certain colors to represent certain things, and I would like to be able to organize all those highlighters and pens into a group where I determine the order and placement. If that is possible in Notability, I haven’t been able to figure it out. Secondly, I use Notability in a setting where I’m regularly working with several languages (including RTL - Right to Left languages like Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic). Notability does not have good support for combining multiple languages in one document at this time, especially not mixed English-Hebrew or English-Aramaic. Please give Notability the ability to recognize and format RTL languages. I can do that natively on most Apple apps, and many 3rd party apps, so the inability to do that on Notability really sticks out. Please improve these issues, and I will gladly give it a 5 star rating. In fact, if those two issues are fixed, I won’t even miss using OneNote for most of my coursework.

Flaws - It is hard to toggle between pen and eraser. The interface isn't as aesthetically pleasing as good notes. It is very hard to add a different page that isn’t the same template as previous pages. The palm rejection is bad. Even if you put on palm rejection it’s still bad and glitches a bunch. Greatness - But through all of that, the app is great. You can record lectures and play them back. There are infinitely more template and page options. And there is a special “social media”, basically a gallery where people can create calendars and fancy note sheets for you to use for free! The reason why I did “social media” is because you can like it and post your own custom page templates. The two tap for undo works much better than good notes, but I turn it off so that it doesn’t randomly undo stuff due to the bad palm rejection. There are more brushes, like dotted and dashed brushes. THE SHAPE MAKER IS BETTER! So you create perfect circles instead of an ellipse or a square. You can also get polygons for those weird boxed. I’m sure there are more things that are great about this app that I may have missed, so please buy it! But if you are more for the aesthetics rather than a student and wanting those good grades, get the other apps! But if you are a student and are okay with a less aesthetically pleasing interface, (but still great templates and note pages!), get this!

Writing a review of Notability is hard. On the one hand, I use it every single day on my iPad. I do a lot of reading/research for my job, so Notability has saved me from being buried under an endless pile of paper. I even pair it up with Scanbot so I can quickly scan materials in meetings and then have all my notes/handouts in a single place. Being able to search my handwriting is a game-changer! So is having access to my documents and notes everywhere, including my laptop, and having all changes and edits synced through iCloud. I’ve always wanted to go paperless with ubiquitous access to everything; Notability is my hub for that. Which brings me to my chief complaint about Notability: it’s iPhone app is terrible. It’s nice to see my notes on my phone if I need to skim something quickly on the go, but basic functionality is missing. You can’t search a document, highlight pages, see all the pages in a document—if you’re looking for something, you can only scroll until you find it. That’s ok if you’re talking about two pages of notes; but if you are looking at a 50 page journal article trying to find something, it’s ridiculous. Competitors have this functionality on iPhones, but Notability has never added it. I wish they would! I also wish they would format text-only notes like Google Docs, adjusting text size for a given display without affecting the formatting.