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Matt Elliott/CNET
If your brainstorming sessions produce a wall scattered with Post-it notes, then the Post-it Plus app can help you scoop up those notes, make some sense of them, and share them with your meeting’s participants.
A year ago, I wrote about a new Post-it Note feature added to Evernote’s iOS app that scanned your Post-it Notes and could organize them based on the color of the notes upon which they were scrawled. Automatically moving all pink Post-it Notes to a shopping list, for example, was a clever trick, and with optical character recognition, your notes were conveniently searchable. That said, I did not once use the Post-it feature of Evernote after having written about it.
Fast forward a year and 3M is out with a Post-it Notes app of its own for iOS 8. With the free, universal iOS app, you can capture up to 50 Post-it Notes at a time. After taking a picture, the app shows you which of the notes it was able to capture (green checkmark) and which it wasn’t (no checkmark). In my brief testing, it had a good batting average. For an unrecognized note, you can tap on it to expand it, adjust the edges of the scanned image, tap Done, and the app will then bestow a green checkmark upon the note to confirm it has been recognized. With all of your notes organized, tap Create Board. Your notes are grouped on a board; a board can contain multiple groups.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
Although you can capture large groups of Post-it Notes at once, the app identifies each individually, which opens up a number of organizational options. You can tap and hold on each note on a board to organize them, dragging each to a new spot or out of the group and into a new group. Tap on a note to view it at full screen and get options to rotate it or delete it. If you tap on a blank area of a group of notes, a menu appears at the top with three options for laying out your notes, plus the abilities to rename the group or delete it.
The button in the upper-right corner lets you share or export a board. You can share via text, email, Twitter, and Facebook, and there are also options to print or save a board as an image to your photo library. You can also link to your Evernote account to add that as a sharing option, and you get the added benefit of OCR from Evernote so the text of your scribbled notes becomes searchable. You can export boards in PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, and Zip formats and save them to Dropbox, Evernote, OneDrive, and Box.
Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET
Post-it Plus does not feature OCR, but it does have a search function. When viewing the main Boards screen, pull down to access the search bar; the titles you gave to your groups of notes are searchable.
