Catch Notes, A Note-Taking App For Android & iOS That�s Definitely Worth A Look

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mobile note taking In my constant quest for the best note-taking environment, I've used Evernote, SpringPad, SimpleNote, reQall, and finally, Toodledo's Notebook, which unfortunately only takes formatted text at best, which still remains a text-only note application and thus doesn't allow me to take more advanced notes with graphs, and what not. Between web apps, I've found Catch Notes, formerly known as 3Banana, to be a very capable productivity enhancer that sports a minimalistic interface and is packed with features.

Since it's also got mobile apps, I feel like many users can probably make really good use of this app, which can be for capturing text notes, but also audio and images. Let's see what makes Catch Notes a top-notch mobile note-taking app.

Rich-Text Files You Can Edit

mobile note taking

Unlike Evernote, which is in my opinion a great, versatile app nonetheless, Catch Notes actually lets you edit the content of your rich-text files, which is a godsend in some situations. You may have, for example, articles to clip, which may include images. You can use the Chrome extension, Firefox addon, or IE Accelerator to clip the text seamlessly or email notes to note@catch.com from several of your registered email addresses. I'm clipping, for example, this Kent University webpage on graph theory, which has images that Catch doesn't initially, er, catch if I use the Chrome extension, but I can easily copy the text plus images and paste them onto a new Catch note on the actual website, which will capture the article nicely.

Android & iOS (iPhone & iPad) Apps

android note taking

iphone note taking

Testing this mobile note taking app on the iOS platform, I really liked the fact that you can record audio notes of up to 2 hours in length, and can access your notes in Airplane mode, that is, when Wi-Fi is off. Not only that, but the app also caches the images, something I wish the native Mail app would do. Not only that, you can keep adding multimedia snippets to the same note, so you can don't have to keep separate images, text and voice notes for the same topic.

I imagine the Android app would have the same features but I should also mention that the developers behind Catch also have two extra handy apps exclusively available for Android users, which you can check out here.

Attaching Files & Limits

iphone note taking

Since you can also attach common image and audio files to any of your notes, keep in mind you have a 70 MB note limit, which resets every 30 days or so. Despite this limit, you can have as many text-only notes as you want, close to 700 minutes of voice notes, close to 20 high-resolution attachable images, and almost 350 smaller images, which sound very reasonable for regular users on the go.

mobile note taking

Is There A "Catch" To Catch Notes?

There are many other reasons why you should at least, peruse through the Catch website as I couldn't cover all of the features here, but let's look at the "limitations". There is a 70 MB note limit, which is still 10 MB higher than Evernote's note limit, and so it's very reasonable. Perhaps a minor detail, but I didn't find any options to back up or export my notes on the website, though you can easily use the import page and export notes if you have an Android handset. I also felt the image capturing ability was a bit buggy at times since the clipped content would sometimes show me the images on the website, and sometimes wouldn't. This didn't happen at all in the mobile apps though.

Overall, Catch is a great addition to your collection of productivity apps. What do you use to capture notes and remember everything? Let us know in the comments!

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