Defter Notes

The concept of the app nice and well executed in many ways. Unfortunately, the price is quite high and there’s no way to try the app before buying it. I would gladly pay for it were it not for the fact that the Apple Pencil ink is not a nice, clean vector stroke like notability or goodnotes. Rather, it is a pixelated blurry mess like the one in Apple notes (which is why that app doesn’t let you zoom). At almost any zoom level it is either blurry, pixelated or both. Also, it’s not really suited for taking quick notes during a lecture. It may be nice for creative work or comparing many different sources of information, but the ink is really too awful for anything in my opinion.

The app is actually pretty solid. It’s a great concept with a clean interface but it has two flaws that make it unusable for me. At twenty bucks, this is a fairly pricey app and yet has almost no documentation. The company has put out a string of YouTube videos that are set to music only, no words, and are really just feature demos but there really isn’t any documentation for this app. For this price the developers should really invest in better documentation. My second issue is that the tool bar disappears in split screen mode such that in unable to add any new elements to the desktop. This means that I’m having to switch between two apps in order to take notes and this just slows me to a crawl.

Please add a search function for the PDF reader within the app!

I just purchased and am turned off by the fact the writing is not crisp when you zoom. Part of the turn on for spatial note taking to me is the seamlessness of not having to think about quality changing like this. Moving from Freeform to Defter Notes is a significant downgrade in terms of the visual crispness the writing. Maybe others won’t be turned off as much by this as me.

I love it, but there needs to be basic things that need tweaking, like in PDFs, there is no back button (if you’ve pressed a link accidentally and you have no idea what page you were reading / working on, or the highlighter, which is gorgeous like the Apple Original tool, but cannot control opacity (at least none that I can obviously find in their controls), and the selection of items like stickers are rather finicky. Anyway, I purchased this app because it IS promising. I was hoping it would be a better version of liquid Text, better aesthetically. Anyways, I’ll keep an eye out for improvements.

Like the concept and intent. Undo/redo would be useful for quick mistakes and eraser size for consistency, including a stroke remover would be good too.

Get this app if you’re in school and you want to take and keep good notes.

This has a lot of potential. Somehow my handwriting using this app is worse than onenote or other apps. i think it needs some pressure sensitive pen . when i use goodnotes or Write I feel like I am using a real pen writing. However my handwriting on Defter is bad enough i can't use this as a journal . I hope Caner can improve this.

This app achieves what OneNote wishes it could. Imagine the digital equivalent of a table at a university library. Your notes, pdfs, sticky notes, are all sprawled out in front of you. You can link areas together, tuck things in notebooks, spread pages out or stack them. It has a bit of a learning curve, and I would normally knock a star off for the lack of decent tutorial, but with so few reviews, this app deserves more visibility. To the developers: Try giving out a free version, and add an interactive tutorial. In the current app landscape, it’s difficult to stomach the up-front cost and jump into a new note-taking app.

1 year review: extremely positive; wormholes make it like taking notes on physical media but enhanced. I tried many different note apps trying to get the closest feeling to taking notes in the physical world but enhanced. Every app fell short in some way until Defter Notes. Most were too restrictive in only allowing one page to be visible at a time, others had obtrusive interfaces that reduced aesthetic character and the usable space, even the “best” like MarginNote and LiquidText felt alien to use. Defter Notes is aesthetically pleasing for the minimalist, it allows you to display and move documents with ease, and now with the newest wormhole feature everything clicks together. It feels best in class when it comes to handwritten documents and notes. Reality but better.