- So the story begins, as it often does, with an article not available in my library's collections. Interlibrary loan to the rescue.
- Interlibrary Loan & Document Delivery | Oregon State University LibrariesInterlibrary Loan & Document Delivery (ILL) | Valley Library - Oregon State University
- I log in to ILL from my iPad, and View the article I want to see.(This is if it just came in. If it's been in for a while, I probably have it saved already to my iPad).
- Now, what program to use to open it? I am a note-taker, can't read without a pen in my hand type of person - so Note Taker HD.
- There are a lot of note taking programs, why this one? It's kind of funky, but bear with me.So the main problem with writing on the iPad is the touch screen - your pen (or finger) strokes are big and clumsy - it doesn't allow for fine detail of any kind.This app has one editing mode that lets you write directly on the screen, like you'd expect. Edit 1 mode - which is what you see here.
- Edit 2 mode, on the other hand, looks like this picture below. See that little blue box on the top right corner? And the big what looks like text entry box on the bottom?Here's the trick. What you write in the big box at the bottom, appears in the tiny box at the top. And it is resized down tiny (where "tiny" really means "normal writing sized").
- You can move the target writing area around by dragging it with your finger - which allows you to add marginalia to your heart's content.
- So, writing with my finger is really hard.
- I really can't do it at all. Plus also, there's the way I have been trained to read with a pen. I've never ever found a keyboard alternative to that - no matter how many notes I take with the keyboard, I always end up back with my pen.I invested in a stylus to make it easier. The iPad really isn't set up for using a stylus (see above, re: not about fine motor skills) but I find this easier on my hand, even if my handwriting is only marginally better. It can get frustrating though -- it's easy to lose the angle you need and easy to add extra dots and lines to your writing.
My Review of the Acase 2nd Gen Capacitive Stylus WITH PICS!! - Apple iPad ForumI received mine from Amazon today, and I couldn't put it down all day. I'm not sure how I even used my iPad without a stylus before. First impressions:- Okay, enough of the finger-writing interlude. Back to online marginalia and notetaking.
- The right side of the text-entry box gives you some easy controls to keep your note-taking smooth.Undo, is of course, the most heavily-used of these.Return works like an old-fashioned carriage return, putting your target box on the next line down, at the far left margin.Advance moves your target box down the page - so you can continue writing almost seamlessly.
- It seems crazy complicated and as this guy says, there is a learning curve, but I swear, it was almost intuitively easy to pick up.I was surprised.
- Marginalia has kind of been trending lately, at least among my geek-writing-reading corner of the web - largely because of this article in the New York Times Magazine.
And maybe it is dead, and this is all an effort to maintain a dying habit in a world that won't sustain it for much longer. Still - look at the colors and the circles and the lines. It makes me happy. - 3quarksdaily: ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’Sam Anderson in the NYT Magazine: One day in college I was trawling the library for a good book to read when I found a book called “How to Read a Book.” I tried to read it, but must have been doing something wrong, because it struck me as old-fashioned and dull, and I could get through only a tiny chunk of it. That chunk, however, contained a statement that changed my reading life forever. The author argued that you didn’t truly own a book (spiritually, intellectually) until you had marked i...
- So, now I have my margin notes and my highlighting and my separate page of "follow up on this" notes that I've been keeping along the way.What do I do with it?Well, I could leave it in Notetaker. There are tags and other metadata options to make stuff findable again. But I want to be able to get this stuff anywhere.
- First I go to my tools menu and choose the pages I want to output.
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