PearNote: Take Notes That Sync Text, Audio, Video, and Slides

PearNote is a $40 Mac-only software application from Useful Fruit designed specifically for taking notes while watching a presentation in which slides are being used. The key feature of this software is that it allows you not only to capture content with your fingers (through typing up your notes) but also through recording audio and/or video of the presentation as well as through importing the slides that were used for the presentation (assuming they’ve been shared with you). And the software synchronizes all of that information on a timeline so that you can play it back later, watching the slides progress, listening to the speaker’s voice, jumping ahead in the presentation by clicking on a particular point in the textual notes. If that description doesn’t make sense, check out Useful Fruit’s explanatory presentation.

It’s a pretty cool idea, and for the most part, PearNote does a good job of fulfilling the potential inherent in that idea.

Overview of the main screen

This is the main screen for taking notes, for playing them back, or for saving or exporting to another location.

1. A familar-looking set of buttons allows you to control the playing or recording of audio or video.
2. There’s a decent-sized space available for taking your notes.
3. If you’re capturing video, you’ll see it here (and be able to re-play it later).
4. Slides from PowerPoint or Keynote (or just PDFs in sequence) can be displayed here.

Detail from the main screen

1. There are a couple of simple text-formatting tools: highlighting and bulleted lists.
2. With one click you can create an HTML version of your notes to share with others as a Web page.
3. You can speed up or slow down the playback of audio or video with this slider bar.

Hypothetical use scenario

The scenario for which this app seems to have been designed is this one:

• You’re an audience member for a presentation that features PowerPoint slides (or their equivalent), and
• The PowerPoint slides have been shared with you in advance, and
• You’re close enough to the speaker to be able to record decent audio (and perhaps video), and
• You’re going to be taking notes while the presentation is being made.

Now, the frequency with which I find myself in exactly this scenario is pretty rare. Usually I’m in the audience for some kind of presentation or meeting that—more often than not—has no PowerPoint slides whatsoever. In that situation, I’d probably just use the ability to record audio and simultaneously take notes sync’ed to the audio. I imagine, however, that there are a number of different apps that have this capability.

Evaluation

I used PearNote to take notes while watching a YouTube video of a talk20 presentation. When I was finished, I turned the notes into an Web page and saved it to the “Public” folder of my DropBox account. (You already know about the magic of DropBox, right?)

• YouTube Video: “Annemarie Wiseman at HubBub’s talk20“
• My notes, as a PearNote-generated Web page: “wiseman“

As you’ll hear if you check out my notes, the sound of my typing is kind of annoying, and if I had been taking notes during the actual presentation (rather than while I watched the video) I’m not sure how to avoid the sound of typing without using an external microphone, which would make the whole production a little more complicated than would be ideal.

I’ve love to be able to embed video from sites like YouTube or Vimeo in the Web page that PearNote produces, rather than only having the option of downloading (or creating) the video, incorporating it into the PearNote document, and then uploading the whole thing.

Other features I’d like to see include the following:

• Allow users to create custom templates for the Web page. There’s nothing wrong with the one template they provide, mind you, but it would be nice to integrate this content more smoothly into a site that has its own established look and feel.
• Allow actual uploading (through FTP and SFTP) of the entire Web page with a one-button click (once you’ve entered the appropriate username and password to make this happen, of course). Currently you save the Web page to your hard drive and then open an FTP client to upload to your own server. (Or, as mentioned above, you can just save to the public folder of your DropBox account.)
• Allow for more fine-tuned editing of the text so that it can be synchronized more accurately with the audio. Often I found myself a little behind or a little ahead of the audio, and I’d like to be able to go back and align things so they’re just right.
• Allow an automatic time-marker to be embedded in the notes at intervals set by the user. For example, I’d appreciate an automatically inserted series of times that are included every 2 minutes.

Overall, however, I’m impressed with PearNote and could imagine using it to take notes at conferences—or during student presentations—and then sharing the results online with others. But expanding its features would make this “really good app” into more of a “killer app.”