aibarr

I used OmniGraffle... it's a Mac program. Outside of class, I drew up a palette of basic drawings that I used a ton, so I'd just drag and drop them onto a new drawing and then label them with text blocks. I uploaded my palette to Graffletopia if anybody's interested in using it... I think I mentioned this somewhere around here before. Anything that wasn't on my pre-drawn palette I could pretty much do with the line and spline tools without a ton of problems... A lot of engineering profs aren't any better at drawing than most engineers, so they use a lot of straight lines. Then, I'd drag/drop my diagrams into my note files.

Equations were a bit hairier. I made autocorrect shortcuts for pretty much all of the Greek letters I used the most, then I used Microsoft equation (mainly because I never actually learned LaTeX) to type in equations. Typically, there were only a couple of equations per lecture, and when there were more, it was typically a derivation series, so I could do a lot of copy/paste. Still, most of my profs had terrible handwriting... Even when I took notes by hand, I'd spend half my time sitting there trying to figure out what things said (is that a phi or a nine...?) so after I started typing my notes, I just got the equation editor set up while I tried to decipher everything. By the time I figured out what the prof had written, I'd be able to start typing straight away.

It never really slowed me down, and when the prof was talking, I could type much more detailed notes than I would have been able to write out by hand. Just requires a little practice.