University Notes With Ipad Pro 12.9 inch

I used an iPad Pro v1 12.9 inch as my daily driver for taking notes where it was invaluable. Had to work around a couple issues though. Most apps organize their content inside their own storage and are not easily portable. So best use only a single program for all your notes. I used GoodNotes at the beginning and switched to Notability later, porting my notes.

The layout

It is necessary to have a strict folder layout, very strict. I was otherwise not able to find items reliably. My layout inside a folder for example was WS19_ITS_00_Orga for a course on it-security I took in winter semester 2019. I organize all organization-notes and similar non-content with the 00-prefix and after the prefix the content name. All prefixes >= 01 have topic names where one or multiple days of notes, examples and tests reside.

Training material and exams had their own prefixes. When I wanted to do one of them I copied the unsolved test and solves it inside the copy. This makes it possible to solve them many times in a row, until comfortable until satisfied.

Summaries were put under the item-name to be summarizes with only _summary added at the end. This made it obvious which summaries are missing which was nice. I usually avoided opening non-summaries at the end to save time and headaches.

Pictures had to be in separate notes because else adding notes above the image made the below ones flow ugly around the image. Pictures should move down together with the text.

Importing was a headache because I had to manually get the items into my layout by putting them into the correct course and naming them correctly.

Why the iPad Pro

The camera is beside handwriting the biggest reason for using an iPad. Just raise your iPad by a couple degrees, press photo, finished. Takes about 2-3 seconds to make and insert one. Maybe that changed with remote courses though.

Summary

I hope a future app improves easy portability, easy importing and easy testing of knowledge and making sure that all what is to do was done.