Use the “Transparent Note” app to skip your next virtual meeting or interview

None of us are superhuman: Even though we try to memorize every talking point or question, we can’t work our best without the occasional reference. Yet he seems more impressive, especially during video calls, if we never need to look away from the camera during an interview or a presentation. The solution, then, is to find a way to watch both your notes and the video call at the same time. OWe have found an application that can help you: It’s called Transparent Note, and the name isn’t kidding.

The transparent note is a simple note-taking app, except for one crucial 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 costs $4.99 for Windows machines.

How Transparency Rating can improve your video calls

There are many use cases for this type of app, but video calling is the one I see myself using the most. If you’re interviewing with a company, you no longer have to awkwardly look at your resume or prepared list of questions if you get stuck. Instead, you can overlay any relevant talking points onto the video call itself: you’re still watching the screen as intended, but you can read any notes you took in advance.

Likewise, it works if you are interviewing someone else for a work. You can reference your questions for the candidate, as well as any notes from their resume that you think are relevant. How about giving presentations? You can read directly from a script while speaking, leaving no one on Zoom the wiser.

How to use the transparency note

Setting up Transparency Note is simple: WWhen you launch it, you can start writing a new note like you would with any 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 on the settings gear in the lower left corner.

From here, you can also change the color of the note from white, yellow, blue, or green, and choose whether the note will rest on all windows or disappear when you switch apps.

Since the Mac version is free to download, it lacks two premium features: you can only write one note at a time, and you’ll encounter ads (though I haven’t seen any in my experience so far). If you want to take multiple notes and/or remove these ads, you can pay $1.99 per month, $9.99 for the year, or a one-time fee of $99.99 for lifetime use.

For me, however, Transparent Note wouldn’t be my primary note-taking app. I would probably copy and paste my talking points into my one free note before a video call, as well as notes from the call on the document. If that sounds like you too, you’ll probably be fine with the free version.