The first is Microsoft's own OneNote competitor - Plumbago, and the second is Action Note.
Plumbago
With Plumbago (let's ignore the stupid name for now) Microsoft declare that it 'is time to retire pen and paper'. I wholly agree with the sentiment, however OneNote is still the winner.
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| Making notes on my Surface Book |
Plumbago features hand-writing smoothing which admittedly does little for my horrendous scrawl. You can create limitless notebooks and each features 25 sheets of paper. I am not as yet sure how you create more sheets of paper should you need them. It does however allow your notes and drawings to span several pages.
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| A little ditty I wrote. |
There are several different types of paper, unfortunately, only one type may be applied to one notebook at a time. You get several different types of lined paper, squared paper, musical notation and even some for fashion designers. I probably wont need this. There is at present no isometric paper - hexagonal paper would be a real bonus. You also can not rotate the paper as you write as you can with real paper and some good drawing apps such as Autodesk Sketchbook.
Syncing across devices is rather strange. My notebooks sync happily between my surface and my desktop, however my Samgsung slate tablet seems to have its own local notebooks and wont sync with the others. There seems to be no settings to decide where your saved notebooks are stored.
Furthermore, there is no support for Windows phone.
At present, despite some nice features, Plumbago is not as good OneNote when it comes to being a reliable note-taking app, nor does it beat a huge number of drawing apps available for Windows.
Action Note
For taking quick notes, there seems to be no better app than Action Note. Action Note integrates with your action center allowing for fast access to your notes. In this respect it simply does beat OneNote, which can take some time to load up and then you need to navigate through your tree of OneNote folders.
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| Action Note on my awesome Lumia 950 running in my action center allowing for very fast note taking. |
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| Action Note on my Surface Book. |
Action Note (Pro version) does everything you would expect or a modern Windows app. It syncs between your Windows devices. There is the option to add files or screenshots from other apps. You can pin notes to your desktop as live tiles. The interface has three themes - the 'dark theme' shown in these images. One my Lumia 950 there is support for voice-to-text and read aloud your notes. You can also scan QR codes and keep their contents or links for later.
Overall this is a really good app that I will use regularly. Plus one geek experience point for Benjamin Sautermeister.
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