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Moleskine debuts app for iPad and iPhone

Moleskine has taken its popular journal and updated it for the 21st century with the debut of the Moleskine app for iPhone and iPad. The free app allows you to choose between font size, paper types (ruled, grid or blank) and text colors. It also comes with some now-standard features that most notes apps have, including Facebook and Twitter sharing. However, one unique feature is the "Map My Thoughts" function, which allows you to geotag a specific journal entry. This provides a way to go back into your journal at a later date and look at all your entries by location.

I'm a fan of the physical Moleskine journals because they're tough and can take quite a beating while traveling. However, while it's nice to see Moleskine release an iOS app, I don't think it has much more to offer than any other note-taking app for iOS. In some ways it feels like it actually has less to offer; the app crashes quite a bit, and its settings are all over the place. Also, if any app deserved to have some page-flip eye-candy that resembles a physical journal, it's this one -- but the Moleskine app doesn't deliver. Not only does it lack any "cool" ways of jumping between journal entries, but it is also missing the basic scrollable text every other iOS app features. If your journal entry is longer than a page, it takes two awkward taps to go between pages in the same document.

The Moleskine app is a good start for a 1.0 release. Besides a few bugs, the thing that keeps this app from really thriving is the lack of a companion Mac desktop app. Despite all the iOS note apps out there, I actually just use Apple's built-in Notes app on both my iPhone and iPad. While Notes lacks features, it has one advantage over many other iOS notes apps -- it has that companion Mac OS X app (in Mail.app). That's a huge advantage, because most things I take notes about are for writing projects I work on at my computer. It's very helpful to have my note texts actually available on the machine that I do most of my writing on. Moleskine is available now and requires iOS 4.2 or later.

UPDATE: After a few more crashes, I can finally swipe to turn pages.



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Moleskine has taken its popular journal and updated it for the 21st century with the debut of the Moleskine app for iPhone and iPad. The...
 

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lunawarner

iPad and iPhone both are great application that are provide to the Moleskine debuts app. It is great feature in the ipad and iPhone. Moleskine debuts app is one of my favourite. and i like to use it.

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April 20 2011 at 7:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
dripfeed

HUH? Surely this is the wrongest app out there?

There are bazillions of paper notebooks on the shelves of a bazillion stationery stores. The whole attraction of buying Moleskin journals is the physical feel of them.

A Moleskin journal app completely misses the point!

April 19 2011 at 9:19 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to dripfeed's comment
rraku2000@yahoo.com

Looks nice. But how do you use the sketch function? Doesn't seem to work on iPhone 4.

April 19 2011 at 4:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
eric

Penultimate has this app beat all day long.

April 19 2011 at 8:55 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Eric Pramono

I really like the app.
I think this is a perfect fit for iPad 2 owners who can easily embed the photos they've just taken into their notes.
Check out my quick review with screenshots comparing how the app would look like on the iPad and the iPhone here: http://bit.ly/gqeJSj
I think the app has a lot of potentials to be a great note-taking app in the future updates.

April 18 2011 at 9:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sean

Seems like they are missing the mark here. How does this appeal to artists, if there's no ability to sketch? Yet to find an app that combines the usability of Penultimate, with a decent text pad, and handwriting recognition. If the core of what makes a moleskin (physical notepad) appealing is missing, why bother?

April 18 2011 at 9:12 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
stewart

Built-in Notes app? That's so iPhone 1G!

My go-to app for quick notes is Catch Notes, offering cloud syncing, hash tags, notes sharing and more. And for more permanent notes,you can't beat Evernote. You can attach audio, photos or videos to your notes, tag them, geotag them, share them and more.

I can't see why anyone would use this Moleskine app - because of the name? Ah, I see the target user now: the same people that thought Windows Word Mobile was something more than Notepad.

April 18 2011 at 8:40 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
XP84

Sorry, the built-in Notes app (and the support for it in Mail.app) fails miserably for me due to the fact that it assumes I want to sync my phone with iTunes. I haven't synced in probably 2 months because it's a pain so it just never happens. So i'd prefer to use anything that syncs OTA.

April 18 2011 at 8:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
gshearman

Whoa, I can't believe the author of this post uses the built-in Notes app. It has to be one of the least functional notes apps out there. My preference is for SimpleNote on the iPhone and JustNotes on the Mac (cloud syncing) but I also use PlainText and Elements from time to time, both of which sync through Dropbox to whichever editor you want to use on your Mac.

April 18 2011 at 7:57 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mare

I use the PlainText app and my notes are automatically synced to my dropbox folder so I can edit them on my Mac without syncing through iTunes.

April 18 2011 at 7:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
web42

A co-worker of my was all excited about this this morning and showed it to me and the first thing I said was they should have spent more time on textures and the UI design in order to differentiate themselves from the other numerous 'notes' apps out there. This is mostly going to appeal to artists and design types so the look and feel should be a priority. So far it fails on both design and function.

April 18 2011 at 7:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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