Notebooks is a writing app, text and markdown editor, your personal Wiki and Zettelkasten, a file organizer, task manager, PDF and eBook creator and more.
Notebooks for iPhone and iPad
Notebooks for iPhone and iPad
Notebooks for iPad and iPhone combines the functionality of a whole set of different apps: it is a Note Taker, a Word Processor, Markdown Editor, HTML to Markdown converter, a Task Manager, a File Organizer, a Clipboard manager, PDF converter and PDF Reader, an eBook Creator, a Document Converter and much more.
Declutter Your Home Screen
Having all that in a single app avoids cluttering your iPad or iPhone with countless apps, and what is even more important: it helps you stay focussed on your work in a consistent environment, which makes you and your workflow more efficient.
What’s New in Notebooks 12
Notebooks 12 for iPad and iPhone is a major upgrade and comes with many changes, improvements and additions. It runs on iOS 12 or higher, and it is a free upgrade for all users of Notebooks 11.
Notebooks 12 welcome you with a fresh App Icon, refined book and document icons and a modernized appearance.
With a simple gesture you can mark books and documents as Favorites, which adds them to a new smart book at Notebooks’ top level. Favorites are like a shortcut to items you need to access frequently, or a quick collection of items you want to temporarily group together for creating an eBook or a PDF, for example.
You can pin documents to the top of the list, independent of the selected sort order. On an iPad, Notebooks can automatically display a book’s first pinned document as index or default document.
It is easier than ever to select any book within Notebooks as Default Inbox. The inbox can appear as smart book, so even a deeply nested inbox is quickly available from the top level. Notebooks also uses different inboxes for different storage locations.
The Apple Watch App is much improved. It offers Complications for quick access, and it lists your Favorites and the contents of your Inbox, too. While notes display as plain text, Notebooks can lay out, indent and colorize the text if you want. And if you add or append to notes from your watch, Notebooks automatically extracts context tags.
Internal link and Wiki links resolve even smarter. With just a title or part of a filename given, Notebooks can find the target, no matter where it is located. So you are no longer forced to enter the full path – although you still can.
Notebooks now supports Automatic Link Management. This makes sure that links don’t break when you move or rename books and documents.
Documents can have Backlinks, which makes it easy to see which other documents are referencing or mentioning them.
To enter the path for a link, hit or tap the TAB button for a list of auto complete suggestions. This makes it much easier to add the path to any document within Notebooks.
The same auto complete is available for context tags, too.
If you are into screen writing you will be happy to hear that Notebooks now supports Final Draft documents. They display in a perfectly rendered layout, including scene numbers.
The full list of changes and additions is pretty extensive, you find all the details in a separate article.
To read what was new in Notebooks 11, refer to the related blog entry. More information about previous versions is available in the version history.
FAQ
Custom Storage Locations: When Options are Grayed Out
The file and folder selection dialog may also show a list of applications like Dropbox, Boxcryptor, OneDrive, and others. These are cloud storage providers, acting as interfaces to data stored on a cloud service. In the dialog, they appear as folders, but they are actually applications controlling access to documents stored elsewhere. While these providers grant access to single, selected files, they do not allow Notebooks to access the contents of their folders. This, however, is necessary to support search, tasks management, contexts, link management and much more in Notebooks. So, while selecting a specific Boxcryptor or OneDrive folder is tempting, these storage providers currently do not supported that.
Notebooks and Apple Advanced Data Protection (End-to-End Encryption)
Starting with iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1, Apple allows users to enable Advanced Data Protection. This end-to-end encryption protects the majority of iCloud data, even in the case of a data breach in the cloud. The term vast majority is not very specific, so you may ask yourself whether this includes Notebooks' documents.
According to Apple's specifications, data stored on iCloud Drive are end-to-end encrypted when transferred across trusted devices. More specifically, any files manually or automatically saved to iCloud Drive are encrypted, which clearly includes Notebooks' documents as well.
So when you use Notebooks with iCloud Drive as storage location, your documents are end-to-end encrypted when transferred across your devices.
If you are still using Notebooks 8 on a device running iOS 14 you probably notice that opening formatted documents or Markdown documents causes Notebooks to close. This is a known issue with Notebooks 8 which we are unable to fix, because Notebooks 8 has been discontinued in early 2020. You find a guide how to work around that on a dedicated blog entry.
Migrate Documents from Notebooks 8 to Notebooks 11
Notebooks 8 and Notebooks 10 provide a convenient method for migrating your documents directly on the device, without duplicating it. A detailed guide is available on this site.
However, you can also set up Notebooks 10 without migrating documents from Notebooks 8, and instead import the documents from your Dropbox or a WebDAV server by setting up the same sync method that you have been using in Notebooks 8.
Notebooks 10 does not support the optional PDF Reader any more (it was available in Notebooks 8). The main reason for this move is that you can now have free PDF editing apps which are much more capable than our PDF Reader ever was. Still, we want to provide our users with the same functionality we had and offer equivalent alternatives:
Notebooks 10 supports the PDF annotation tools that are part of iOS 13. So you have basic PDF editing tools available simply by tapping a PDF document once. (Notebooks' PDF handling capabilities will grow with the next releases).
In Notebooks 10 you can use the "Open in…" menu to open PDF (and other) documents in external apps without duplicating them. So you store and manage your PDFs in Notebooks, but use external apps to open, view and edit them. All changes you make are stored in Notebooks. If you need a recommendation for a PDF editing app - and if Apple Books is not capable enough - you could look at the free app PDF Viewer, which is the more grown up version of Notebooks’ former PDF Reader.
