MacStories reviews Nebo

Over at MacStories, John Voorhees reviews the note-taking app Nebo. It looks like one of the first apps to finally bring one of my dreams to the iPad: handwriting recognition. Taking notes on the iPad has always been a source of frustration for me because it seems like converting handwriting to text should be one of the very first problems to solve. Nebo seems to be solving that problem, and more:

Converting handwriting to text is simple. Just double tap and the conversion is nearly instantaneous. The process is fast because Nebo is doing the recognition on the fly…The real-time recognition of your handwriting also means that you can perform searches of your handwritten notes without converting them to text.

Earlier this year Ben Brooks wrote about how the current crop of note-taking apps for iOS were missing some pretty big opportunities:

There are some promising apps, like Notability, Noteshelf, Notes Plus, Notepad+ — but they all have a fundamental flaw. For some reason each of these apps try harder to replicate what you would get from a paper notebook, than to take advantage that they are digital.

Brooks mostly focused his criticism on missing features like user customizable grids, shape identification, task lists, and detectable bookmarks/links. But I’d argue that handwriting recognition—which opens up handwritten notes to text search—is even bigger than all of those.