Back in the dim and distant past, or more precisely – ten years ago, I used to use an HP Compaq TC1100 tablet. It was the most wonderful machine, and was years ahead of it’s time.

I’d say that it is the second best computer I’ve ever used after the macbook pro. The very best thing about it was the pen and the digital ink. Nothing has ever beaten it. Evernote came close once, when it would allow digital ink in notes, but that disappeared a long time ago. Even the evernote notes weren’t great because digitising on the old XDA phones was terrible.

So since I got my ipad I’ve been looking for something that would give a similar experience to OneNote as it originally wasn’t available. When it was finally released for iOS it only allowed text to be entered from the keyboard – I mean, what’s the point of that, if you’ve got a lovely touch screen?

For the past two years I’ve been using something called Notes Plus, which is a wonderful app, but you would have to export to PDF and then send to Evernote for any permanence and then the document couldn’t edited elsewhere.

Anyway, all that changed last week with the latest release of OneNote for the ipad. The ink was now included and notes could be scribbled with relative ease.

The note taking isn’t quite as easy as with Notes Plus, but the benefits far outweigh the extra care taken when writing. OneNote is on the phone, mac, android and web (and on the PC, obviously). Notes synchronise super quick and very simply, and I can import PDF’s for annotating and export to PDF too. In one upgrade, the program turns from yet another clumsy note-taking and organising application to something super-useful. I’m very happy.

I’ve spent a very pleasant hour or two planning the week by filling in and colouring blocks of time in the week’s calendar:

And then copying it back into my google calendar:

I defy anyone to come up with something more fun than colouring-in calendars.

…or maybe I don’t.

This all came about after I was playing with a Lynx 8″ windows tablet, which is an excellent machine. I had mentioned on Facebook that I was missing the digital ink and a friend pointed me in the right direction. Sadly for the windows tablet, the actual digitisation of the strokes was much poorer than on the ipad – but to be fair, the windows machine was a fifth of the price of an ipad. As I said, the Lynx is an excellent machine, but now that I’ve got my digital ink on the ipad, there’s no going back – yet.

In terms of exercising, it was a standard Saturday day-off. So I headed over to Martin Mere for a quick walk. Two circuits of the site came to just over 3km, which I did in around 30 minutes. It would have been quicker had there not been so many gates, so many Other People going slowly and had I not been taking photos. But there are so many birds at this time of year. It’s a lovely place to walk.