Mental Note for iPad ‪๛‬ 4+

Significant lag in notes with lots of text

I use this app all the time. It's a place where all the little odds & ends and tidbits of info get stashed. I notice that when a note gets a lot of text (say 1,400+ words), there is a noticable lag for any action in that note (say...typing, or moving around the note using arrow keys on a keyboard).

This does not effect other notes in the app. So if one note has 1,500 words...noticable lag, but typing in another note that has only 100 words, works just fine.

There are other issues with this app, but this is the one that's currently bugging me. However, it *still* is my go to note app.

Developer Response ,

Here are a couple suggestions when working with a large amount of text.

1. Try small blocks of text:
This may help with typing speed, moving around the note, and note taking in general. When you're working on a note, consider breaking up new thoughts or sections of the note with sketch lines. This will only work when you're creating a new note. One possible workflow might go like this: You create a new note, typing some text into the note. Then, before adding a new idea to the note, grab the sketch pen, and draw a horizontal line in the empty part of the page beneath the text you just typed. Tap Done, then tap in the blank part of the page beneath the line and type a new idea into the note. This may help make smaller text blocks, and help organize the thoughts in the note. It's like when you're working with pen and paper you might write an idea, then draw a line across the page, and start a new idea beneath the line. Please contact us by email at support@zymbiotic.com so we can send you a screenshot demonstrating this idea. Please note you need to: type, sketch, then type for this to work, (i.e. it will not work if you type everything and try to go back and draw sketch lines in between already typed text). You may have to re-create those notes with really long sections of text by copy-pasting sections into a new note and sectioning off (e.g. with a sketch line or a photo) at relevant points in the note to make some smaller chunks of text. Please let us know if you are going to recreate the note as we can send some additional tips (please contact us by email for more info).

2. Try multiple notes organized by tag and note linking:
Another thought is to use a number of smaller notes, and those can be grouped together with tags. Special note links may help organize the notes as well - read more about that here: https://www.zymbiotic.com/usingmentalnote/notelink

Please get in touch with us at support@zymbiotic.com to discuss this further, or for assistance with any issue. Thanks for using Mental Note!

Disappointed! FURIOUS!

Great if you don’t want to forward or export your notes, audio / images.
It appears that there are tremendous technical support issues. Mental Note gives a false impression that the notes get sent, no error messages to the contrary return message and find that 2 months after emailing notes to clients that they were lost in space. I only discovered this because my new boss kept saying he didn’t get the notes which means my accounts from the convention and new clients didn’t either. When uploading to Drop Box it doesn’t keep any format and randomly you get 60 audio messages in your folder which means it’s completely useless. I thought I was being so efficient by sending notes to my accounts within minutes of them leaving the convention showroom from when they toured. No way to contact this Mental Note company, settings doesn’t allow you to troubleshoot.

Developer Response ,

Sorry that you are so disappointed and angry.

In a number of emails between yourself and our company support email address (support@zymbiotic.com) we did discuss how Mental Note hands the note off to Mail to complete the email send, as is typical with most apps using email on iOS.

We talked about how email may be sent right away or may be queued by Mail to be sent, and we suggested trying sending from an alternate email address in case certain mail providers have certain unknown email sending limitations.

Export of notes is an extremely important feature, please see here for detailed export instructions: https://www.zymbiotic.com/usingmentalnote/exporting. Exporting to Dropbox as PDF will place a PDF document in the exported folder, along with any audio recordings contained in the note. The recordings have filenames which correspond to the same name used in the exported PDF document.

The use of Mental Note is ideal in a tradeshow or convention showroom environment, unfortunately it is difficult to say whether network or email provider issues prevented your emails from being sent. One possibility which wasn't discussed before is the "60 audio" recordings. It was unclear if the 60 recordings were exported due to a single note export or if that happened when you used the "Export All" feature. Though having 60 audio recordings in a single note is definitely possible from a technical stand point, from a usability stand point that might mean all your client interactions from the tradeshow were going into a single note — which may not have been what you wanted. Though it is possible you could have had 60 audio recordings in a single note, if exported to email, that would cause more than 60 email attachments to be added to the email. Mental Note has a built-in check for attachment size limit — if the total email attachments would be more than 10 MB, Mental Note itself would not present the option to export with email. So if the Mental Note export option "Email" was used that means total attachment size was under 10 MB which any email provider should be able to handle. It is possible that certain email providers could have limits as to the number of items attached to an email; this might result in an email provider sending the message, but without the attachment(s) — do we know if recipients received an email but without an attachment?

Another possibility which wasn't previously discussed is what if the recipients received the email message, but with an attachment that they didn't know how to open? The typical way of exporting with email is to use the "PDF to Email" option — that would have sent a PDF and all audio as attachments which anyone could open. If "Note" format was used that would have sent the message in a special Mental Note format which would have required the user to have Mental Note to open the note. Do you recall which format you attempted to use when you exported by email? Please get back in touch with us so we can try to find out what went wrong.

Should be a Universal App -- not another $3

I had this app on the iphone. I don't mind paying for a separate iPad app if there is a lot of extra functionality. But in this instance, there really is no real improvement over the iPhone version. This should have been released as a Universal app so that iPhone owners would not have to pay again for it (and vice versa).

I do like the app's ability to contain multiple data types (voice, images, text, handwriting), and like that it all exports well via email. But, HATE the fact that it only supports 1 page at a time, and has no easy way to group multiple pages (i.e. a notebook) and export them all together. The app also really needs an Undo/Redo option.