Microsoft releases OneNote for Mac, makes it free on all platforms

Microsoft has launched its OneNote note-taking application for the Mac platform, while at the same time bringing making it free for the Windows platform. OneNote for Mac and Windows is available in a 'freemium' model, with some additional paid features available to 'premium' users. The company has also introduced a new cloud API to enable developers to connect their apps to it.

The OneNote application was earlier available for PC, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android, and the Web (formerly known as OneNote web app), and has now been introduced on Mac for the first time. The OneNote for Mac app will like the rest, sync automatically with Microsoft's OneDrive cloud-storage service, keeping notes in sync across all platforms.

OneNote for Mac is available to download for free from the Mac App Store on iTunes.

The OneNote application was, however, available for Windows as a paid-version before. The new free version of the application misses on some of the features that are seen in its paid-version like SharePoint support, version history, Outlook account integration and more (all of which are available to 'premium' Office 365 and Office 2013 users), as per The official Microsoft Office Blog. The free OneNote app version is also ad-free, not a limited-time trial version and is made for home and school related uses only.

Additionally, Microsoft has released the OneNote cloud service API for third-party app makers to integrate the service with the app. The cloud service comes with few features such as OneNote Clipper, through which users can save web pages on OneNote; me@note.com email for sending certain notes to the app as mails; and Office Lens, which is Microsoft's optical-character-recognition-technology, used for capturing documents and saving them in OneNote.

Other key features include sending news articles to OneNote via other news apps like Weave, News 360 and Feedly; scanning of physical notebooks into the app via Mod Notebooks; Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote via Livescribe and more.