Notability and Goodnotes are two of the best. They also have desktop versions of the apps that automatically sync with your iPad over iCloud (handy!).
I personally own and have used the following and would rank them in this order:
- Notability
- Perfect Pencil support: absolutely no lag, pressure sensitive... awesome
- Good iCloud syncing
- Automatic PDF Export to Dropbox
- Continuous scrolling
- Good PDF annotating
- Excellent ability to annotate images
- Good iPhone App
- Good OS X App
- Instant Sync between iOS using iCloud
- Unique: Lecture audio recording synced to your notes!
- Goodnotes
- Great Pencil support (even has a mode where it will ONLY take input from from the pencil - completely ignoring fingers)
- Good iCloud support
- Mediocre Dropbox support
- Bad: no continuous scrolling!
- Good PDF annotation
- Unique: search handwritten notes!
- OneNote
- Good Pencil Support
- Pressure sensitive
- Azimuthal angle sensitive!! I haven't seen this in any other notes app. It's not just "tilt" it is also using the "direction" of the tilt
- Unfortunately: LAG
- Good: Can turn off "finger marking" so that it will only accept input from the Pencil
- Bad: interface takes up WAY too much screen real estate (especially the bar on the left)
- Poor support for inserting images with handwritten notes
- Poor "Pages" organization. Are you really supposed to create a page for each page? Or just one per session (like for each day of notes)?
- No Dropbox
- No iCloud
- UPAD3
- Update: 2/8/2016: with the latest update it gained really good compatibility. I have thus moved it way up the list!
- Good Pencil support: minimal lag, excellent accuracy, good pressure curve, excellent resolution independent marking
- Weird eraser (built for a finger or fat stylus)
- No continuous scrolling
- No Dropbox support
- Lots of Pen options
- No desktop app
- PDF Expert
- If your "notes" consist of marking up PDFs (like slides published by your professors before class) this is the one to use.
- Great Dropbox support (can edit documents directly on Dropbox and they are synced back immediately)
- Looks great on the iPP
- Continuous scrolling (it's under the "aA" button in the top center)
- Decent Apple Pencil support
- Minimal lag
- No pressure or tilt sensitivity
- Good accuracy
- Noteshelf
- Decent Pencil support.
- It's weird because it is pressure sensitive but it also still has the stupid velocity based line thickness enabled (NoteShelf used this with old styluses to make handwriting look more natural)
- More lag than Notability and Goodnotes
- Medium accuracy
- Odd organization system (do they really think you want a whole notebook with all of the notes for a class in just one huge document?)
- No zooming!
- No continuous scrolling
- It seems like the interface hasn't been updated for iPP (still a bit "biggish")
- No Dropbox
- Penultimate (Evernote)
- Ok Pencil Support: WAY more lag than Notability and Goodnotes
- No iCloud
- Dropbox support
- No PDF annotating
- Zoomnotes
- Poor Pencil support: Huge lag, not accurate, poor pressure curve
- Really bad pixelation on strokes with the pencil
- Only backup to Dropbox
- Paper by 53
- Not really made for doing hand written notes
- Ok Pencil support (lots of lag, but does support tilt detection for shading)
- No iCloud
- No Dropbox
- Unique: lots of drawing tools
- Notes Plus
- Not updated for iPP
- No Pencil Support
- iAnnotatePDF
- Not updated for iPP
- No Pencil Support
- Great Dropbox support
- Outline
- Just terrible Apple Pencil support
- Jerky, laggy, imprecise. Awful.
- Do not buy under any circumstances (wish I could get my money back!)
Not really a notes app, but still cool: Liquid Text. Great for reading research papers and organizing clips from them.
[doublepost=1453005165][/doublepost]Here's an example from Notability (please excuse the bad handwriting... it looks like that on real paper too! ;-)
View attachment 610913