If you have been looking for a natural feeling and powerful note taking app, look no further than Notes Plus. This strong note taking app offers lots of flexibility. You can enter notes with your finger or stylus. You can type and record audio. You can annotate your PDFs. You can even type notes and draw shapes. With an additional in app purchase, you can translate your handwriting to text.
If you are trying to create details, it offers a close-up writing mode, stroke smoothing, vector shape auto-detection, palm handling, complete folder structure, images, PDF exporting and emailing, automatic backup to Dropbox and more.
The video below shows off many of the features and abilities of this app.
The developer describes the features as follows:
1. SMOOTH HANDWRITING
Close-up writing mode lets you write comfortably with your big finger or stylus just like pen on paper (refer to the screenshot). Lay your palm down comfortably on the palm pad or below the close-up box.
2. TYPED TEXT
Mix typing with handwriting by inserting movable textboxes or full-page text in any font the iPad supports.
3. BACKGROUND RECORDING
Record audio easily while taking notes. The audio will be linked to the pages on which it was recorded for easy playback. When you switch to another app, the recording continues in the background.
4. PDF ANNOTATION
Import a PDF via iTunes File Sharing or choose “Open in Notes Plus” while it’s being viewed in another app to add it to Notes Plus library for annotating. You can add interleaved pages for more notes, or even move/copy pages from one notebook to another to create one single notebook that keeps all your related notes together!
5. IMAGE INSERTION FROM MULTIPLE SOURCES
Enrich your notes with images from Photos, your iPad camera (iPad 2 and new iPad only), or the web. You can then rotate and resize them to your every need.
6. AUTOMATIC BACKUP WITH DROPBOX
Take notes without worrying about backing up all your important data. Just link to Dropbox, turn on “Automatic Backup and Restore” and let Notes Plus do the rest. Notes Plus will also automatically download backed-up data from Dropbox to your newly purchased or restored iPad.
7. BUILT-IN WEB BROWSER FOR QUICK REFERENCE
Enjoy the convenience of having reference materials handy while taking notes! Just flick the splitter bar aside and the web browser is ready for use. You can also drag images from the web or capture partial screenshots over to your notes. Notebooks can be opened in the browser panel as well.
8. COMPLETE FOLDER STRUCTURE FOR NOTEBOOKS
A notebook can have as many pages as you want and can be stored in folders or subfolders like in a file system. Password protection of your notebook/folders is also possible.
9. HANDWRITING RECOGNITION (in-app purchase: $1.99)
Conveniently convert your handwriting to searchable text with MyScript™ handwriting recognition module. Notes Plus supports the same set of languages as MyScript Memo.
10. CLEAN & NATURAL USER INTERFACE
As you can see from the screenshots below, this app stands out for its clean interface. A great effort was put in to hide controls so that it would not clutter the interface. You should be able to start without a tutorial, but in case you need one, there’s a built-in Quick Start Guide. Check it out now at: http://notesplusapp.com/files/QuickStart_V4.pdf
Conclusion
If you want a powerful and natural feeling note taking app, look no further.
iPad Notebook 
A review of this app can’t possibly be complete without a comparison to the app it is clearly trying to compete with: Notability. Not even a bare mention here, though? $8.99 for Notes Plus is baffling to me when Notability is $0.99. I’ve used the latter as an attorney for at least two years now, and maintain running notebooks on each of my individual cases, annotate and sign PDF documents, take deposition notes, and the list goes on. I was looking for a great competitor which might have a different approach with some improvements over Notability’s excellent features, and was mildly interested in Notes Plus… until I saw the price-gouging $8.99 figure.
Notability is a good app. There have been issues with trying to back up your work as it does not work as seamlessly with iTunes as other apps do. Notability recently became a universal app available on both your iPhone and iPad so you can take notes and sync them with which ever device you want.
To me, Notes Plus is the better choice if you prefer to sketch out and take notes in the traditional sense.
Te each their own. Thanks for your comments.
you could give the option to put a picture on the notebook cover.
thanks
I have tried many note taking apps and keep coming back to notes plus because of the small things – i take outline style notes and notes plus remembers my tabs. The continuous scrolling is almost perfect with no delay at the end of line like notabiliy and noteshelf. And the ability to add and reorder pages in whatever sequence I want is invaluable. I also couldn’t live without multiple paper types within the same notebook. I love notabiliy’s colored pages AND I love noteshelf’s huge variety of notebook cover designs. But function wins out over form. Though I must admit, with the huge number of notebooks I create, I would really like it if notes plus would offer additional notebook covers, even if I have to buy them. Things are getting hard to find since so many of my notebook covers look alike. And as a visual person I would really love to have all the beautiful choices noteshelf offers. If they are out there for notes plus and I just haven’t found them…someone please help a girl out!! 🙂