Pear Note: note taking for the best of us

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;)

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)

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.