Transparent Note, a discreet note-taking app

Transparent Note is a note-taking app that offers transparent notes that can be very practical during a video call.

No one is superhuman: we all query our memory more or less daily, but we cannot remember everything, especially when we are doing several things at the same time and/or when there are several stakeholders. Taking notes or reading them is almost mandatory now. Unfortunately, with video calls, this may seem inconvenient, because, in particular, it is no longer necessary to look at the camera. Can I view my notes and camera at the same time? There is a perfect app for that: Transparent Note.

Transparent Note is a very simple note-taking app, but your notes can be transparent, allowing you to see what’s behind the notes in question, on macOS or Windows. The app is free for macOS users (with a paid premium version), but costs $4.99 for Windows computers.

How Transparency Rating Can Improve Your Video Calls

There are many use cases for this type of application, but all video calls are intended. If you are interviewing for a company, you no longer need to go through a resume or list of questions. You can simply place your notes on top of the video stream. You continue to watch the video stream and read your notes at the same time. Similarly, if you are interviewing, you can read the questions you want to ask the candidate and also look at their resume.

During a presentation? You can directly read your text during a conversation, and no one on the other side will know that you are “cheating”.

How to use transparent note

Setting up a transparent note is very simple: when you start the application, you can write a new note, just like in any other similar application, but the note will be transparent. If you want to see more or less of the background, you can adjust the transparency level by clicking the settings icon in the bottom left corner.

From here, you can also change the color of the note—white, yellow, blue, or green—and decide whether the note should stay on top of all windows or disappear when you switch apps.

The macOS version is free, but if you pay for the premium version, you can take multiple notes at the same time and you won’t see any ads, although they are already very rare in the free version. If you are interested, you will have to pay €1.99 per month, €9.99 per year or €99.99 for a lifetime license.

That being said, if this transparency feature is indeed very useful, Transparent Note will certainly struggle to perform better than the app you already have. It’s better to just copy and paste into Transparent Note to enjoy transparency when needed than to pay for a paid version.