I’m not sure I can do it justice, having just gotten back into using it. When starting to study a topic, you create a notebook and add books to the notebook. Books can be PDFs, EPUBs, etc. You can then read the documents on one half of the screen, and drag highlights into the workspace of the notebook. These highlights (cards) can then be linked together, notes and pictures added to them, etc. The cool thing is the cards are linked back to the original PDF/EPUB, so you can jump back and see things in context. And, there is much, much more (outlines, flashcards, etc.).
I’ve linked their intro video below. If you’re interested, it’s well worth taking some time to watch some of the Paperless Student and/or Tutoriots videos (linked below).
I like it for studying multiple PDF and linking concerns together. Steep learning curve but more powerful than liquid text. Biggest issue is syncing across multiple devices which is a problem on MN3 for months. Hope they solve that issue soon
Not months … a year or more. This is the biggest issue for sure.
MarginNote is also a self-contained system. The annotations cannot be recognized by any other PDF annotation tool. This problem is the same for LiquidText, but at least MarginNote properly imports annotations from PDFExpert (LiquidText does not).
Finally, I agree, when I compared LiquidText and MarginNote, that MarginNote has a stronger feature set.
From experience, it works 99% of the time. The 1% being some conflicts if I grab the iPad and move to/back from my Mac and edit the file before it fully syncs.
They’ve been using iCloudKit for a while and that seems to work a lot smoother than did a few years back. It even works when the Study Notebook is open on both devices (thus the temptation to edit simultaneously on both devices, but I will advise against it).
I confirm what @ldebritto reported. Sync among devices (e.g. Mac and iPad) with iCloud works fine for me as long as I do not have the document and/or study notebook open on more than one machine. I make it a habit when I finish working with MarginNote on any device, to run the sync command and wait a few seconds until it completes.
