OneNote for Windows goes free, Mac client and new APIs introduced

OneNote, the note taking application that lives inside the office suite has now been unbundled on Windows and made free for the desktop, like it has been on other platforms and even the Windows Store. Talking of platforms, Microsoft has also just introduced OneNote for Mac, which has been a long standing request from Office for Mac users. The client will work just like the Windows client, with access to the OneDrive cloud, the familiar arrangement of notebooks and all the tools OneNote is known for. Apart from this, Microsoft has also opened up new APIs for OneNote, with which one can develop apps supporting the service and the cloud.

The OneNote team detailed the new features in their blog –

1. OneNote for Mac is available for the first time and for free. With this, OneNote is now available on all the platforms you care about: PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android and the Web. And they’re always in sync.
2. OneNote is now free everywhere including the Windows PC desktop and Mac version because we want everyone to be able to use it. Premium features are available to paid customers.
3. The OneNote service now provides a cloud API enabling any application to connect to it. This makes it easier than ever to capture ideas, information and inspirations from more applications and more places straight into OneNote, including:

• OneNote Clipper for saving web pages to OneNote
• me@onenote.com for emailing notes to OneNote
• Office Lens for capturing documents and whiteboards with your Windows Phone
• Sending blog and news articles to OneNote from Feedly, News360 and Weave
• Easy document scanning to OneNote with Brother, Doxie Go, Epson, and Neat
• Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote with Livescribe
• Mobile document scanning to OneNote with Genius Scan and JotNot
• Having your physical notebooks scanned into OneNote with Mod Notebooks
• Connecting your world to OneNote with IFTTT

As you can see above, the OneNote app is now finally on par with other really popular note taking services like EverNote that exist on almost every platform possible. By taking this route, Microsoft now has the ability to address a larger audience and compete with the other services. The Office 365 suite will still come with One Note, but with more premium features like Sharepoint integration, versioning and more. The cloud API is an interesting new addition because it lets developers make add ons for their present services, like for example you can now Scan notes from third party apps Livescribe, JotNot, Genius Scan etc or even send articles directly from RSS services like Feedly, News360 and Weave. This is apart from the already used features like web clipper and Office Lens OCR scanning on Windows Phones.

With all these new features and a overall larger addressable audience, OneNote is now one of the more full featured note taking clients out there. More information at the source link.

Source Office Blogs