Notebooks: Write and Organize

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1. ★★★★★data, history or progress disappears

   Data gone!. I have used Notebooks for years and have been generally happy with it. However, with the most recent update every last bit of data in my app is gone. Wiped out without warning. I have tried reaching out to the developer, but have still heard back nothing. Caution about using this app for anything important. You may never see your notes again.

2. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Very difficult to sync one version of Notebooks to another. Very difficult to sync one version of netbooks to another

3. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   It doesn’t sync anymore!. Please fix the sync feature! It just started timing out whenever I try to sync. Nothing is wrong otherwise. If you can’t fix this, please refund my money.

4. ★★★★★data, history or progress disappears

   Notebooks for Mac Sticker Shock—Even Worse, Lost Documents Upon iPhone Upgrade. Thinking to expand my use of Notebooks 11 for iPhone as a writing tool (and to facilitate moving notes from my phone to my laptop—which I still struggle with getting to work reliably), I looked into buying the Notebooks 2 for mac. Ouch! What’s wanted is nearly US$40, with NO apparent discount for already have purchased the application and module for iPhone. Frankly, I was expecting a price of about half that. I’m not exactly “rolling in it” and have to manage my resources carefully (e.g. refurbished mid-2012 MacBook Pro, refurbished iPhone 7). I think I will have to wait to buy the mac version for full integration. Even worse, when I upgraded my phone, documents I had stored on my old phone within Notebooks didn’t move over to the new. There’s probably a way I can drill down and cause this to happen (good thing I saved the old phone), and because the documents are important original written work, I will have to do this. The thing is: I shouldn’t have to. Documents should move over like everything else does during a phone upgrade. Fail.

5. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Watch App Stinks. Downloaded this app because the watch integration seemed great. However, the only button on the watch app is “New Task”. Nothing else. I can’t see my documents or tasks (even the ones I created from the watch). Just spent $12 on this app (and I even purchased the extra $3 custom storage location). Complete waste. Really wanted to like this app, but truly the app experience is utterly horrible. I’m using an Apple Watch SE (purchased in 2023).

6. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   Disappointed. Notebook app costing $9.99 keeps freezing up. Very frustrating!

7. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   LOTS of bugs! :(. The manual says it supports Fountain format. It doesn’t. There are multiple screenshots for the app that show an image with text right next to it. You can’t actually do that in the app. It says it supports Apple Pencil. You can’t actually write in or on your pages at all. You can have either text OR you can have Apple Pencil. You aren’t allowed to have both. False advertising, even the screenshots and manual claim features that aren’t present in the app. :(

8. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

   App is cr@&. Update: Now when I paste on a text document, the left side doesn’t line up. The first line in every paragraph is on the left margin, but the second line on are indented one space in. Absolutely terrible. Unable to place cursor where I want to. The position of the cursor keeps moving quickly so it takes a lot of time to get it where I want it to be. For example, if I want to correct “the epple tasted good”, it is not easy to place the cursor after the e in epple and change the e to an a. The position rapidly moves across the lines and words. Was manageable before, but has gotten worse to the point of frustration.

9. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

   Cannot have attachments to markdown files. The App Store description makes it sound like you can attach images or other files to a markdown file. I bought it mainly for this reason, no way to get refund now...

10. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Dependency on Dropbox kills it.. This is a 5-star app, but without Files support, it is limited by the weakest link, which is Dropbox support. Now that Dropbox only supports up to 3 devices, you can only easily sync between 3 devices, which means Notebooks can only be easily used between 3 devices. I love this app. It is easily the best notebook app out there. But seeing as how I have to choose between multiple desktops, my phone and my iPad, I can’t recommend it. This limitation was excusable when iCloud was less established and the iOS file manager was new, but there’s no reason to ignore it any longer. I’ll revise this rating when I can easily sync between more than 3 devices (I have 5 I use regularly). There is so much good in this app and in this update, it is an absolute shame that it is still hobbled in such a manner.

11. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Loved it for a while. Then came the bugs.. Crashes when conducting a search. Crashes when cutting text.

12. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    You reintroduced bugs. You delete negative reviews. You have no idea how to ‘library’ software and version control. Again, you brought back the defect where a paragraph immediately followed on the next line by a hyphen, then when saved, that paragraph changes to all bold font. And for the brief time that your app worked properly, it also loaded a lot faster. Now it’s back to go do something while it’s loading. So we’ll see if you delete this review too.

13. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Web addresses. Disappointment - tapped on saved web addresses I’ve saved and they don’t open in browser. Evernote does, I may have to go back to Evernote

14. ★★★★★crashes, freezes and errors

    Crashes under iOS14. Please update to work with iOS 14! Ever since the update, trying to open half my files trigger the app to crash on my iPhone !! A few still seem to open ok, but I can’t figure out a pattern. The copy of the app on an iPad that hasn’t had the OS updated is still working fine. Updating to Notebooks10 didn’t help. If this gets fixed, I will be happy to update my rating since this used to be a five star app for me.

15. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    No PDF Reader. Had notebooks8 and purchased the version 10. Very disappointing, it doesn’t come with the PDF reader which was essential part, now we have to use two apps to do one job. If am going to read file in another app why do you need this, the only reason why I purchased this is the excellent function the optional PDF reader offered, frankly everything else can be found in some other free PDF apps

16. ★★★★★negative experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Was really hopeful... 😢. I wanted to like this app. But if you’re importing thousands of notes from Evernote, the “Windows” character limitations are a huge pain. If you have any of the forbidden characters in the titles of your notes, (characters that are NOT a problem on a Mac or in Evernote) you’ll spend hours stripping them out, just so the notes will sync from Dropbox.

17. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Technical Issues. I recently bought this upgrade from the previous app, hoping that some features from the previous would disappear. I don’t like the idea that bolding, italicizing, and etc… would get rid of the symbols at the start and end of the portion highlighted. It ruins the flow of writing. Lastly, I can’t indent the starting sentence of a paragraph. The old app allows me to do this, this one does not.

18. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    -different colors. Please offer the feature of having different color words ON THE SAME PAGE. When I change the color, it changes the whole page. I would like to have One line in black, one line in red, one line blue, etc. . . . .

19. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    New Changes. Don’t like the new changes especially since we had to pay for them. The old system was much better and easier to use. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

20. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Stability Concerns. 2023-01-23: I downloaded this app about 15 minutes ago and it has crashed several times on my iPad. The feature set is very versatile with many export formats and the feature to set up a book as a task list is actually the type of functionality I am looking for to be able to track projects and project notes over extended periods of time. And I like that data is not collected. It was also positive that there appears to be continuous development and maintenance. Other apps I have used do not appear to be supported any more so it’s risky to keep using them.

21. ★★★★★subscription and paid restrictions

    Last update ruined it. This has always been the most used application on my iPad as it would do everything that was important when handling PDFs, word processing and reviewing files of various descriptions. It was worth paying for Dropbox even through many other apps have found a way of synching with iCloud just to have the features available. Sadly, Mr. Schmid has decided that he cannot afford to continue providing PDF integration other than in the rudimentary form that Apple provides. You can no longer search PDFs that have been OCRd or use the annotation tools that were previously provided for an extra fee. His response is that you can open a PDF in one of the other PDF annotation apps and use Notebooks as a file system. While the program will still fill the needs of many, the lack of going forward with an alternative synch method to Dropbox and removing the extensive PDF annotation and search integration has substantially diminished its value. I would have no problem in paying on a subscription basis if this were corrected but that does not seem to be an option.

22. ★★★★★mixed experience without a specific reason· unspecific

    Not happy with 10. So far to many bugs. Have gone back to using old version. Main complaint is that Ver. 10 keeps shutting done while trying to enter data.

23. ★★★★★overall positive experience· unspecific

    Pretty good Notes app. I've been using it over the years for various writing projects. However, the formatting leaves a lot to be desired. OK--found increase font size under Settings. Overall it's a handy app; however, I don't use nor understand Markdown and the UI is just confusing. Not my go-to Notes app; I use Apple Notes or Craft. I do like this one to open up and view Web Archives.

24. ★★★★★overall positive experience· unspecific

    Not working on new ios. this version is not open in the new version of iOS

25. ★★★★★overall positive experience· unspecific

    Everything is gone!!. I have used this app since 2018. I changed to the iPhone 14 pro. I redownloaded the app and now everything is gone. Please help

26. ★★★★★overall positive experience· unspecific

    great accesibility with voice over!. the ease of use with voice over plus the ability to categorize notes, compress multiple text files into a single document, and many other features listed in the description set this app apart. Adding this app to my life meant finally getting rid of the other four or five filled with clutter!

27. ★★★★★overall positive experience· unspecific

    You CAN still sync it with Dropbox. It’s just hard to find. I initially wrote a bad review because it says it doesn’t sync with Dropbox. But actually it does He wrote….. This version still synchronizes with Dropbox, no worries. - Please bear in mind that you can set Notebooks to either sync with Dropbox or sync with iCloud. So I guess that you have set Notebooks to store its documents on iCloud. To change that, open Notebooks' settings > Locations and switch to "this iPhone/iPad". When done, you find Dropbox as an option in Notebooks' sync settings."

28. ★★★★★overall positive experience· unspecific

    Loved this app but a couple frustrations. Going to keep this brief because I just lost a longer draft of this review by switching apps to confirm details of my review.. (Not my day for technology!) Basically the app worked great until I had several hundred documents, and now it’s constantly getting stuck slowed down while syncing with iCloud for 30-60 seconds, where typing is impossible and you just have to leave the app open and wait. If you do type, it will create duplicate versions of your documents that you will then have to manually go through, to see which is the most recent version and delete the other(s). Also, it’s way too easy to accidentally delete instances of a word via Find & Replace, while searching for a term. There’s no confirmation before or way to undo this. Nor is there any way to just Search, the replace button is always lurking…The Replace button is right next to the button to clear the search text field, and while the app was slowed down, I must have accidentally hit the Replace button and not cleared the text field, and then if you hit space bar (right next to “next” button [next instance of word—located on the return key]), you’re screwed. The replace/repace all buttons are at the bottom of the screen in the keyboard area at that point so if you’re continuing to try to type/ if the app glitches/slows down for a sec, you can easily hit them by accident. 23x instances of a word I was searching for deleted from a 30k word document, with no way to fix it, except to manually read through and locate, write the word back in throughout. I’d had issues with this feature before, but never to this extent. Trying to test it now to confirm details of how it’s happened in the past but the app keeps crashing.. Anyway, if it sounds improbable, you just have to imagine that you’re typing quickly, and that it’s a simple series of misclicks, since all of these buttons are in the keyboard area. At the point of it having happened to me multiple times, I imagine I can’t be the only one.. Similarly, I think it’s absurd to have a delete button on the toolbar. Who is this for? It’s easy enough to un-delete a document but I don’t know why it needs to be in the corner all the time. Anyway, I’ll probably just go back to the original version of Notebooks, despite liking other features of the newer version, and manually syncing documents to laptop being annoying/fallible bc these issues^ have become sooo frustrating.

29. ★★★★★stable and reliable performance

    Functional, but execution is sloppy for some features. This app has so many great features. But some of them don’t work in a particularly reliable or predictable way. For example, after clicking the icon to bring the text editor into full screen mode, the sidebar and toolbar vanish from view (as expected). However there’s so easy way to bring them back into view and exit full screen mode, so I have to quit the app if I want to access the document browser in the sidebar again. I wish I could use Apple’s default San Fransisco font, but the so-called “system font” is something totally different. Finally, Apple’s Universal Clipboard feature for copying text between devices doesn’t always work. ie. if I copy a rich text clickable hyperlink on my iPad and try to paste it into Notebooks on my iPhone, no text appears. My workaround is to open a Quick Note in Apple Notes, paste it there, then copy that and paste it back into Notebooks.

30. ★★★★★overall positive experience· unspecific

    I wanted to like it.. UI/UX is awful. I started a sketch and made it pretty easily, but then my “document “ was 3 pages. Tried to delete the extra blank pages and couldn’t figure out how. Finally ended up deleting the 1ˢᵗ page, and ALL my work. Then discovered there is no undo. Just not acceptable to not have undo in a modern app, nor a UI/UX that’s not easily discoverable. Disappointed, at least on the iPhone.