Scrapnote is a little bit note-taking, a little bit collage, and a little bit rock and roll.

A brand new app released for the iPad today in the App Store called Scrapnote is full of a little bit of everything, including awesomeness. Scrapnote is the perfect way to create a modern scrapbook. You can pull in videos from YouTube, photos from your library, PDFs and other types of documents or notes from Dropbox or other apps, reminders and data from Evernote, anything you’re looking at on the Web, scraps from your clipboard, and so much more.

In no time at all, I was able to create the 2 pages that I photographed for today’s post. You can see the toolbar place where you grab your material in this photo (in the middle). Just click on the source for what you want to include and get started. There’s even an inbox to store things that you open from other apps or pull in from the Internet. It’s like a holding area for all of your ideas. To pull in things from other apps, you just use the “open in” button in available apps, like Dropbox or your email.

There’s even a bookmarklet that you can install from the settings menu that allows you to just click one button in Safari and pull in whatever you are looking at. It works just like the Pin It button for Pinterest, except that it opens up the app for you to place your item instead.

One thing I really like is that the YouTube videos you bring in are watchable within their box on your page instead of taking you to YouTube itself or something to watch them. They just play perfectly right on the page. You could even put your own videos on YouTube (and make them private if you want, I think) and that way you can add your own videos to your scrapbook/note.

When you download the app, you will find in your library (pictured to the right), a user guide notebook and an example notebook of ideas of things you can do. And, wow they are inspiring. The user guide is short and sweet, and I found the whole process of creating a new notebook and creating the pages I did completely intuitive and easy.

As you can see, there are a variety of covers that you can choose from for each notebook you create and it doesn’t seem there is any limit on the number of notebooks you can create or the number of pages within them. When you create a notebook, you choose the paper you want to start with for the notebook and a specific cover comes with it.

To edit the cover of each notebook, click on the little i in the upper corner of the book. From there you can change the look of the cover or edit the title. To enter edit mode for the entire library, just click and hold one of the notebooks. That way, you can delete or export any notebook. Right now, you can only export through iTunes File Sharing. Hopefully, there will be a way to link to Dropbox or something else in the future.

And, if you find that you just want to take some notes or draw a picture, you can do that, too. There is a quill for writing or drawing, a marker, a highlighter, and an eraser included in the app. You just pick which one you want, what size you want, and the color you want, and you’re off. You can work in both portrait and landscape mode, which is very nice!

I do wish that you could pick your colors from a color grid instead of being limited to the 15 colors included in the app. But, it’s a brand new app, so I expect we’ll see lots of developments and additions down the line from this exciting new offering.

The writing is smooth and natural with any of the tools included. This is handwriting at its best on the iPad. The only thing you can’t do is write really small. This developer also has a note-taking app called Jotter, which is one of my favorites because of its beautiful handwriting, which obviously made its way to this app.

If you decide that you want to add a little bit of text (or a lot), there is a text input selection in the toolbar, as well. There are 6 types of boxes within which to write and 6 types of notes/stickers to write on. Each can grow to any size you choose. It’s a really nice intro selection, but I hope to see more in the future and maybe the ability to edit the color of the notes that exist currently. But, I love the natural and fun choices there are so far.

All of the usual Apple fonts are included, and you can change the size, orientation, and color of the text, too.

Everything you bring into Scrapnote is within a frame and you can choose from 5 frame options currently. I really hope this selection gets bigger and that you can choose the color, size, and shape of the frame in the future. But, it is a nice intro offering. You can also include a title with each item and when you click on the little i in the bottom corner of the item, you can see and edit the title and see where the item came from and when it was added.

To access the frame selection, move the item around on the page, and access the option to crop the item, you just hold down on the item for a few seconds. It would be nice for there to be an edit button that just allowed you to move things around on the page. Right now, if you forget to hold down for a few seconds, you draw on whatever you are trying to move. But, there are easy undo/redo buttons to help you get rid of whatever. If you choose to crop the item within the frame, you just move the slider up and down until it’s the size you want and then move the item around in the frame until it is placed the way you want.

To resize anything on the page, just click and drag from the bottom, right-hand corner.

There is an in-app browser that lets you go to any website and scrap anything from that site. You can click on the photo button and all the photos from the page pop up Pinterest-style. You select which photos you like and click scrap to add them to the current notebook or to your inbox. You can also crop part of the page and scrap it or just scrap the entire page. Very cool.

If you accidentally put something on one page and want to move it, just press and hold it, and select cut. Then move to the page you want to put it on and press and hold the background and select paste.

And, if you want to see all of the pages in your notebook at once or jump to another page quickly, just press the page numbers on the bottom of the page and a lovely box pops up from the bottom and shows you mini mock-ups of all of your pages. If you have a lot of pages, just hit the white up arrow to make the box go full screen.

You are supposed to be able to do this from the library view as well in a “quick look” without opening the notebook, but I can’t figure out how to do it.

My last wishes for Scrapnote (as you can see, I’ve scattered my wishes throughout the review), include that there be a better selection of paper choices for the page backgrounds. Currently there are 13 choices, but I only like a few of them. I would like to see more colors and textures to really be able to create “art” out of scrap. I do absolutely love that you can choose a different paper for each and every page of a single notebook or apply the paper throughout the entire notebook. It’s up to you. I love that. And, lastly, there needs to be a way to look at your notebook without the toolbar in the way so that you can see how it looks when you’re finished. There isn’t currently a way to hide the toolbar.

At an introductory sale price of $2.99, Scrapnote is an absolute steal of a deal. This app has me more excited than I have been in a long time. It is just works smoothly and easily. Working with Scrapnote is a delight and a breeze. You will have a beautiful note/scrapbook/journal/art piece in no time at all. This is a wholly original app with a combined set of featues I have never seen in one place before. Very, very cool!

That’s it for me today. Until later, …

Posted with Blogsy