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Moleskine debuts app for iPad and iPhone

Moleskine has taken its popular journal and updated it for the 21st century with the debut of the Moleskine app for iPhone and iPad. The free app allows you to choose between font size, paper types (ruled, grid or blank) and text colors. It also comes with some now-standard features that most notes apps have, including Facebook and Twitter sharing. However, one unique feature is the "Map My Thoughts" function, which allows you to geotag a specific journal entry. This provides a way to go back into your journal at a later date and look at all your entries by location.

I'm a fan of the physical Moleskine journals because they're tough and can take quite a beating while traveling. However, while it's nice to see Moleskine release an iOS app, I don't think it has much more to offer than any other note-taking app for iOS. In some ways it feels like it actually has less to offer; the app crashes quite a bit, and its settings are all over the place. Also, if any app deserved to have some page-flip eye-candy that resembles a physical journal, it's this one -- but the Moleskine app doesn't deliver. Not only does it lack any "cool" ways of jumping between journal entries, but it is also missing the basic scrollable text every other iOS app features. If your journal entry is longer than a page, it takes two awkward taps to go between pages in the same document.

The Moleskine app is a good start for a 1.0 release. Besides a few bugs, the thing that keeps this app from really thriving is the lack of a companion Mac desktop app. Despite all the iOS note apps out there, I actually just use Apple's built-in Notes app on both my iPhone and iPad. While Notes lacks features, it has one advantage over many other iOS notes apps -- it has that companion Mac OS X app (in Mail.app). That's a huge advantage, because most things I take notes about are for writing projects I work on at my computer. It's very helpful to have my note texts actually available on the machine that I do most of my writing on. Moleskine is available now and requires iOS 4.2 or later.

UPDATE: After a few more crashes, I can finally swipe to turn pages.