If you’re on the lookout for note taking apps, Helipad is a great one to try. It has a somewhat weird interface, but this is not at all a negative comment on my part, I quite like it. To me it looks more like a content management system, but in reality, it’s a powerful text note keeper, nothing more, nothing less.

It features tags, addons, themes, nice viewing options, and all in all, an efficient, productive way to manage your notes. Editing is very much like creating a Wiki, which might deter some folks at first, but the syntax is very simple and there is a guide available on site, let’s look deeper.

Creating and editing

When you create a note, you are faced with four tabs, one to go back to your notes, one to edit, one to preview and one to share. You need to use a Wiki-like syntax to create your notes, but don’t be afraid, this is not at all hard, you can enable an editing guide just over the editing field. Using “*” for bullet points, “h1.” for a heading and a few others are all you need. It’s a nice surprise that you can even add images with URL’s, all of this is executed smoothly and with easy of use in mind.

I actually like that there is no menu to bold, italicize or change the color of text. This throws my focus to editing, and not actually writing. It does probably take more time to format text like this, but hey, you’re taking notes, not editing the Encyclopedia Britannica.

I also like the fact that there is a separate filed to enter the title and tags. This keeps it nice and clean and is a bit different from other apps, a fresh idea and interface, always welcome in my book.

Organization

I also love the way the notes are shown separately in boxes. This is the “preview” view, and it shows you the title, tags, length and some other options. I don’t think this is the best view for organization and productivity though, but fortunately there are others available. The list view does just what you’d think, lists all your notes, with some additional info like when it was created and last edited. There are also sort options available to list by name, date created and so on. These are pretty standard features, but work well and give you powerful organization options.

Addons

An interesting feature for Helipad is the addon section. You can install additional plugins like right to left writing, table of contents, word count as you type. This is an interesting concept, since why don’t they have these features built in, or as options in the settings page? Well, from one standpoint, they could offer many of these, but look at what happened to Firefox. A group of developers could give us a bunch of options and that’s it. Or they can open up the development and let thousands of people develop addons. I’d choose the later anytime.

My verdict

Helipad is a solid application for managing your notes and making yourself more productive. You can store a lot of notes in the alloted space and you can organize them very well using tags and the list features. The Wiki style will be a blessing for some and a curse for others, but I think the learning curve isn’t too steep. This app is one of the best out there, I think it deserves more hype it currently gets.