Filed under: Software, Productivity, Education
Pear Note: note taking for the best of us
Though I graduated from college (Go Bears!) not so long ago, in computer years it seems like ages: notebook computers have almost completely replaced spiral-bound notebooks, and PowerPoint and Keynote are increasingly supplanting the chalkboard. The changing dynamics of teaching demand a change in the way students take notes and learn, and Useful Fruit's Pear Note (available for free trial for 30 days, or $39.99 for purchase) addresses these changing dynamics for students. It's like TiVo for note taking.
Like or hate PowerPoint/Keynote-based lectures, they're complimenting, and sometimes supplanting, the chalkboard -- and sometimes even the professor -- in the classroom. As a result, taking notes "ain't the way it used to be." Sometimes, the notes you take end up looking identical to the PowerPoint deck that your professor's lecture was based on. So, instead of jotting down everything your professor is saying verbatim, why not just jot down those things that matter most? That's where Pear Note comes in handy.
Say you arrive to class with MacBook in hand. Your professor, like many professors, is a PowerPoint fiend and posts a copy of the day's deck for students to download, often times the day of, and sometimes just prior to, the lecture.
In a Pear Note workflow, you'd first need to launch Pear Note and open the PowerPoint file that today's lecture will be based on. Said PowerPoint deck will now appear on the bottom right hand corner (re-sizable to your heart's content). When your professor begins his lecture, click "record." As your professor clicks to the next slide, so do you. All the while, you're capturing his or her audio that's accompanying the slide.
For example, let's say that my professor is lecturing on Richard Feynman today:
- Say we're currently on slide two, and my professor reads one of Feynman's favorite quotes. Here, I'm echoing the professor's words by writing, "In short...Feynman was a hero for the physics geek..." The professor then moves onto the next slide. And as he moves forward, so do I. I click on the right arrow as he moves on to slide three.
- Now the lecture is done after slide three (short lecture, I know). I stop recording the audio. When I play back the lecture, the slides, text and audio are all synced together. So if you missed something, you can always highlight the words you'd like to focus on, which will bring up the corroborating slides and audio -- and vice versa.
At first glance, it's tempting to compare Pear Note to Circus Ponies' Notebook, which I'm also a huge fan of. And to a degree, this comparison is warranted; that's because both are marketed as note taking apps. While Notebook is more fully featured than Pear Note, and in many ways is a note taking suite, Pear Note better accommodates a PowerPoint/Keynote-heavy lecture. If budget isn't an issue, the two apps together would provide a college student a robust note taking package.
Updated note: Pear Note supports PDF-based slides as well.
TUAW readers can receive a 20 percent discount off the original price ($39.99) of Pear Note for the next 30 days by using the "tuaw" at checkout when purchasing Pear Note.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Maurice said 2:48PM on 10-14-2009
I didn't start using a laptop to take notes until grad school in '02, just as PowerPoint decks in every class were becoming standard. This would have been awesome to use back then. I can see this as a valuable tool for conferences today.
The audio doesn't fit into my note-taking style but I would like to see some way to export the slides with my text in notes section (or on a corresponding following page) to share with others or to use in Windows.
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glas11 said 2:54PM on 10-14-2009
Anyone know if there is a chance this would perform similarly with mulit-page PDF files? Most my prof's will not give out the PowerPoint presentations due to copyrights so they distribute PDFs instead.
The voice recording sounds nice but without a directional mic it seems like you'd be hearing the noises around you and little of the professor behind your computer.
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Sang Tang said 3:01PM on 10-14-2009
@glas11,
Yes, it does support PDFs. I'll update the post to note this.
MRB said 3:06PM on 10-14-2009
I hate to be a kill-joy, but there are a couple of legal implications that users of PearNote could get caught up in.
First is the issue of recording a conversation without the prior consent of all parties to that conversation. For example, when a live concert is recorded for DVD, the artist will post signs warning attendees that they may be recorded. Most states have laws that construe this as a form of eavesdropping, and violations of these statutes can burden an offender with some unnecessary legal headaches. From a practical standpoint, one could make a request of the lecturer to get make a student's continued enrollment in the class a tacit acknowledgment of the recording, but that guy who refuses to sign it is always the same asshole that sues you, simply because he can.
Second is the issue of the lecturer's copyright in their materials. By posting PowerPoints, your lecturer has granted you license to use those for your own educational purposes, but the "license" your lecturer grants you to hear his lecture is distinct from a license to record that lecture. It's a BS distinction, but that's what my Copyrights professor said. . . or so I remember.
Really the only thing to remember is that Lawyers take the fun out of everything, are nothing but a transaction cost, and are all just a bunch of sticks in the mud.
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Matt said 3:19PM on 10-14-2009
I don't think the voice recording is an issue - remember all those micro tape recorders that are still sold to this day in college book stores across the world? I had one when I was in college and I didn't get anyones "consent" to record them. Everyone should know by now with cell phones that have cameras and voice recorders that you should not do anything you don't want to see on youtube later.
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Joshua Ochs said 3:40PM on 10-14-2009
Keynote isn't complimenting the lecture. That would be it telling the prof what a good job he/she's doing. It may be complementing it, perhaps.
Homophones, contractions, spelling - these things were taught by the third grade, and are NOT hard.
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SableFable said 5:55PM on 10-14-2009
Does anyone know of a decent (autofocusing, mac-compatible) web cam with a directional mic inbuilt, so I can record my lectures?
SableFable said 5:55PM on 10-14-2009
Lame, it went in reply - sorry Joshua!
Marko said 7:39PM on 10-14-2009
Sable Fable - I haven't used it (I have the Snowball w/o the cam), but this might do the trick
http://www.bluemic.com/eyeball2.0/
Chad Sellers said 10:01PM on 10-14-2009
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Pear Note.
I have the Blue Eyeball 1.0, and while the audio quality is great, the video is pretty bad. Perhaps version 2.0 is better, but I don't know. I primarily use a Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro when I use an external webcam. It has excellent video (including autofocus), and the audio is not bad. The mic is not directional, but it works well enough for my purposes. That said, the internal mic in my Macbook works well enough as well. It's not something I'd want to publish, but for taking notes it is more than adequate.
tdjrichardson said 4:36PM on 10-14-2009
I used MS Word (2004?) and its notebook layout. It didn't allow you to annotate slides, but it does allow recording.
The notebook layout works as bullet point lists, which certainly fits with my noting style (especially allowing easy indentation). The magic bit is that Word puts a marker point in the recording at every (ish) new bullet. So it's easy to listen to what was being said when you took a particular note - helping solve those "yeah, I wrote that, but what the hell does it mean moments" at revision time 6 months later.
As for recording quality - that was a bit of a problem on my powerbook. Typing noise could make it quite difficult to hear sometimes. In extreme cases an export to iTunes and some basic EQing did the trick. Of course you lose the marking in those cases...
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patrick said 5:53PM on 10-14-2009
The audio record seems to me to be a potential problem.
W/O a direct audio feed I fear the ambient noise in a classroom would
be a big hassle on playback. I do this professionally ( capture live presentations) and there is no way we can get close to good quality
without a audio feed from a mixer.
Nice concept. Just get on the front row I guess.
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Yakov Hadash said 6:15PM on 10-14-2009
You're much better off with a notebook and a pen – easier to carry around, zero bootup time, no delays or lags of any kind, no need to worry about batteries.
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Tim said 10:35PM on 10-14-2009
Your clearly not a current student. Everything is computerized and powerpoint/endnoted. While a lot of students in my courses print the slides and annotate directly on them, i personally use word 2008's notebook view in conjunction with the slides - i have the slides on the right of my screen and copy/paste them across as needed along with any additional annotations.
Tim said 10:40PM on 10-14-2009
Uh...I meant to say keynoted. Too many essays using endnote!
Yakov Hadash said 9:20AM on 10-15-2009
Guess again. Not only am I a student, but I've been a full time student since 1985. (I graduated in 2006 from University of Pittsburgh and I'm in grad school at Jewish Theological Seminary in NY.) After trying many various systems for years, I've settled on mini-sized moleskines (one per class) as the best way to take notes that works for me with a minimum of fuss and shlep.
Aaron said 6:21PM on 10-14-2009
Might I not be able to use Evernote for the same purposes? And then have the advantage of being able to read it from anywhere and save some $$$ (always a concern when I was a ramen-eating student).
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Adam Schoales said 10:07PM on 10-14-2009
I've given it a shot: it's not perfect. But it's a great concept. Personally i feel there needs to be a way for the slides to open in a seperate window and formatting tools for the note portion (like the ability to align paragraphs).
I find myself running pear note and typing in write room and then copying over ever few minutes.
plus it has a tendancy to corrupt my lecutres every so often (especially when trying to bring in my profs stupid powerpoint presentations - so now i just bring in PDF versions)
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Chad Sellers said 11:01PM on 10-14-2009
Thanks for the feedback Adam. One note - if you double click on the slides they'll pop out into their own window (same goes for video).
eindietmar said 7:19AM on 11-09-2009
Seams to me there might could some other nice notetaking app come up.
Did anybody see www.thoughtsapp.com. The books in the background maybe hint to another such kind of app, hopefully;) otherwise quite nice pearnote, but audio doesn´t fit in my notetaking workflow too;)
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