What is the crowd's opinion of Pear Note?

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Here's one I never see mentioned that is pretty cool: Pearnote. Its annoyware, so if you don't pay, it just prompts you to buy it after you open it when the 90 days is up. You don't ever have to though, iirc.

It takes a recording while you type, so you have the class lecture recorded. you can jump to any point in the lecture by clicking on the text you wrote during that part, and listen to what the professor had to say.

No, sorry -- I sort of just gave up after spending too much time looking. I think there is software for Macs though, but for typing rather than writing: http://www.usefulfruit.com/pearnote/

It's still in the back of my head to do this with a smartphone screen, though it's much harder when most smartphones now have capacitive screens and would require particular styluses (styli? haha)

I bought a Smartpen a couple years back and I'd do without my laptop before I'd get rid of it.

There's also Pearnote on the Mac, and with a cheap USB webcam pointed forwards, it will capture video and sync it to your lecture slides/notes.

I've used both extensively, and would have to say that while Pearnote is probably the better option in terms of capturing information, it's a bit of a pain in the ass to set up, whereas the Smartpen is just "sit down, open book, tap record". It's a bummer not capturing the visual feed, but there's other bonuses, like being able to search your written text with the desktop software (The OCR is surprisingly good; my writing looks like a spiders been dipped in ink and run across the page and it still finds nearly all search terms)