Review: LiteNotes is as simple as it gets.

While the native Notes app on your iPad is simple, there are a lot of complaints about the annoying yellow paper background and the Felt Marker Font. They were tolerable for the iPhone where they were readable on the small screen. But the bigger screen of the iPad reveals their true cheesiness.


Hello Helvetica.
LiteNotes uses Helvetica, the most popular print font in the world. Just watch the movie Helvetica and you'll realize its the font we live by and probably the most readable sans serif font. Arial, the most common web font, is a bastardization of Helvetica. LiteNotes also uses a plain white background that's easy on the eyes.


Zoom makes room.
LiteNotes offers you infinite font sizes for viewing. Just pinch the screen and you can shrink or enlarge as big as you want. But the cool feature is that the text is reformatted to fit the width of the screen so there's no annoying sideways scrolling. I find it nice to enlarge for writing and to shrink it for faster navigation.


Flip your notes.
In addition to the standard list and search functions for your notes, LitesNotes can flip through them. Swipe right right to go back a note. Swipe left to create a new one. This is especially handy in landscape more where the menu doesn't show.


It's okay it's only text.
Blessing or curse, there's no formatting. Notes can't change fonts or add colors on the iPhone either, but can in Mac Mail. Occasionally this formatting seems to get in the way when pasting to Pages and certainly can wind up confusing to look at. With LiteNotes, what you see is what you paste. LiteNotes at the moment offers no sync, but you can email your notes.

I find LiteNotes a nice little repository for text with full screen editing. The zoom feature makes it easy to highlight tiny or massive amounts of text. This one is a nice addition to your dock.