Third-party OneNote app does what Microsoft can't

At the end of 2011, Microsoft released Office OneNote for iPad, bringing the cult favorite note-taking application to all of Apple's devices.

But major shortcomings with the freemium OneNote for iPad app have earned it a significant number of negative reviews in the iTunes App Store. Third-party iPad app Outline+, released at the end of July, seeks to provide fixes to these complaints. So far, the app tackles two of the major issues plaguing the iPad version of OneNote: syncing and formatting.

Syncing

The most common complaint of users of OneNote for iPad is that the SkyDrive sync feature is slow, crashy, and error-prone, frequently running into sync conflict issues. Outline+ instead syncs with Dropbox and iTunes, providing users with either a cloud-based, or hardwired alternative method for quickly uploading and downloading their OneNote Notebooks.

Formatting

Outline+ claims to be "the first and the only app on AppStore that works with Microsoft OneNote files directly. Even Microsoft's own app can't do that."

In Microsoft's OneNote for iPad, formatting issues are a frequent complaint: with organizational features like indentation, bulleting, numbering, and listing missing, and often a complete inability to display inked (handwritten) notes. As one reviewer said in the App Store: "If you've taken a lot of ink notes, you can pretty much forget using this as a stand-in for your computer even for just reading the notes."

In Outline+, all formatting, links, and images are retained, and the user can edit by typing, formatting text, creating lists, adding images, and creating sections and subsections.

The ability to ink directly on notes is still not present, but the Outline+ team is working on that. That feature isn't present in Microsoft's app, either, so things can only get better. Additional features promised in upcoming versions of Outline+ include Skydrive sync, Sharepoint and protected sections compatibility for the Enterprise version, and Math symbol support.

Outline+ includes full support for OneNote 2010, partial support for 2007, and no support for 2003. It can be downloaded in the iTunes app store immediately. Once you buy the $14.99 app, updates are free for life.