Use the Transparent Note App to Get Through Your Next Virtual Meeting or Interview
None of us are superhuman: no matter how hard we try to remember every topic of conversation or every question, we can’t work our best without random references. However, it does feel more impressive, especially during video calls, when we never have to take our eyes off the camera during an interview or presentation. So the solution is to find a way to view your notes and video call at the same time. We found an application that can help with this: it’s called Transparent Note, and its name is beyond doubt.
Transparent Note is a simple note-taking app, except for one important difference: your notes can be transparent, allowing you to see what’s behind the note itself on your Mac or PC. The app is free to download for Mac users (with premium features behind a paywall), but it costs $4.99 for Windows computers.
How Transparency Note can improve your video calls
There are many use cases for this type of app, but I see video calls being the most used. If you’re interviewing at a company, you no longer have to look awkwardly at your resume or prepared list of questions if you get stuck. Instead, you can overlay all the important topics of conversation on the video call itself: you’re still looking at the screen as expected, but you can read all the notes you’ve taken beforehand.
It works the same way if you are interviewing someone else for a job. You can refer to your questions for the candidate, as well as any notes from his resume that you think are relevant. How about making presentations? You can read directly from the script during a call without leaving anyone at Zoom wiser.
How to use the transparency note
Setting up Transparency Note is simple: when you launch it, you can start writing a new note just like any other note-taking app, but now your note will be transparent. If you want to see more or less of the background, you can change the transparency levels by clicking the settings gear in the bottom left corner.
From here, you can also change the color of the note from white, yellow, blue, or green, and choose whether the note sits on top of all windows or disappears when you switch apps.
Since the Mac version is free to download, it lacks two premium features: you can only take one note at a time, and you’ll be faced with ads (although I haven’t seen them in my experience yet). If you want to take multiple notes and/or want to remove these ads, you can pay $1.99 per month, $9.99 per year, or a one-time fee of $99.99 for lifetime use.
However, for me, Transparent Note won’t be my main note-taking app. I would probably copy and paste my talking points into my only free note before the video call, and also jot down the notes from the call into a document. If that sounds like you too, the free version is probably the one for you.