iMeetingPad – App Review
By 
I’ve been using my iPad at work for the past month to determine whether or not it can replace my laptop in the office and on business trips. As part of this review, I’ve been playing with iMeetingPad, a new iPad app, to jot down notes in meetings and capture ideas while I’m on the plane. I left my trusty paper notepad on my desk and replaced it with my iPad and iMeetingPad to see if it could replace my old school paper method.
iMeetingPad is a simple app focused on helping you organize and share the typical written notes and drawings you might take during a meeting. The interface is clear and provides you with several customization options ranging from paper type, font, font size and colors. Using the app is very simple; once you launch the app you’re given a blank sheet of paper to start your notes. I usually started my note taking by entering in meeting details such as the meeting title, purpose, attendees and date into the “Meeting Info” window. I would then take written notes using the iPad’s on-screen keyboard or sometimes with my BookArc stand and Apple Wireless Keyboard. Both of these setups worked great and allowed me to capture all the important information during my meetings. I also took advantage of iMeetingPad’s drawing tools to capture org charts or diagrams that often get discussed in internal and customer meetings. The drawing tools had several features (colors, lines, fills, shapes, etc) and worked great but I wish there was an easy way to duplicate a shape instead of drawing a new one each time. This would have saved me some time when drawing org charts where I wanted all the boxes to be the same shape and size.
With each meeting note, you can continue adding pages so you’re sure to never run out of room. iMeetingPad keeps track of all your meeting notes via the “Meetings” button conveniently located in the navigation bar.
Once your meeting is over, you can quickly send out the notes using the built in mail feature. Your notes are instantly converted to PDF and attached to a new message in the iPad’s email app. Another nice touch, iMeetingPad takes any text you have in your meeting notes and includes it in the body of the mail message. This way you have the meeting notes in PDF and as plain text so you can forward or edit them on your computer.
Another feature of the iMeetingPad is supposed to allow you to use your iPad as a 21st Century overhead projector by hooking it up to an external display. We hooked up an external VGA display and had mixed results. The external display did not match what was shown on the iPad’s screen and when we used the app to draw, the video was laggy.
So did iMeetingPad relegate my paper notepad to the desk drawer? Not yet, I still carry around my paper notepad for short meetings but I’ve kept iMeetingPad on my iPad and use it for meetings where I know I am going to take several notes and will need to share them with others electronically. iMeetingPad saves me the step of taking my handwritten notes and retyping them into a new email. Anything that helps me save time stays on my iPad.
What I liked: simple way to take & organize notes on your iPad
What I didn’t like: no undo, lacks landscape mode support, no built-in text search, VGA output buggy
To buy or not to buy: If you frequently go to meetings or to class where you need to take notes, iMeetingPad might be a good fit. The ability to keep your notes organized and share them with colleagues or classmates is sure to be a time saver for many. If you want to use the app primarily for the external display feature, you might want to wait until the bugs are worked out.
