Goodnotes 5 ipad how to#
Goodnotes 5 ipad free#

The experience should be as frustration-free as using a paper notebook.Sadly, there are other things that will keep me tied to Apple Notes. If it hadn’t been there, it would have been a deal-breaker.Īs it is, Apple Notes, despite the amazing Apple Pencil, is a means of punishing yourself for something awful in a past life.

Goodnotes 5 ipad how to#

Oh boy, how can Apple be so good at hardware, but so bad at UX design? I spent a lot of time googling to find out how to zoom in to create neat handwriting. It’s a skill you learn with patience and practice. Double tap again, and the screen goes back to normal size.Ĭombine the inflexible layout options, no pinch to zoom, and triple finger tapping, and you don’t get a great non-intrusive note-taking experience. However, you can turn on full-screen zoom and activate it by double tapping with three fingers. This offers quite a few options, most of which I couldn’t make sense of. You have to go to the Accessibility section of settings and enable zoom. Left to itself, Notes will not let you zoom in so that you can write small, neat text. You certainly can’t get a view of the entire note and zoom into a bit you want to look at closely.Īll that, however, is not the worst news.

You tap on an image, and it fills the screen. Pinch and Zoom isn’t available to get closer looks at the images. When I embedded screenshots from the video, I discovered that they could either be big or small. I’ve never taken a screenshot of a video and tried to write notes beside it however. Previously, I’ve embedded screenshots of slides and written over them. If you accidentally put so much as a dot somewhere in your note, a drawing area is created, and you can’t put text there. You can tap on the photo/image and annotate it, but the annotations will appear in the photo/image. If you insert a photo/image, it’s treated like a character, which means that you can’t put a drawing tight against it. Want to insert a photo or screenshot? Things get confusing. You have little control over where text goes and drawings go. Pages are divided into type content and drawings/handwriting. You can tap on a pen icon at the top right to invoke handwriting, but otherwise you tap and type. I guess you could pretend to print it out at a particular size to see where page boundaries fall. That happens if you print it out, which means it’s hard to know in advance where text and drawings will end up. You don’t select page sizes when you create your note. This means your notes live isolated from (say) a writing project, but that seems to be par for the course. This app stores notes in folders, but as with the other note-taking apps, doesn’t use the Files app for storage. Chocolate fudge brownies using Apple Notes Taking hand-written notes with Apple Notes Notability got out of the way, and I could concentrate on learning how to make delicious chocolate brownies. I was pleased with the note-taking experience.

Goodnotes 5 ipad free#

Apart from typed text always starting at the left margin, Notability is free form. I missed GoodNotes’ loupe, but I liked being able to view everything at one go. I took advantage of Notability’s capability to view all its pages as one: Notability’s toolbar is smaller than GoodNotes: Most of the time, that’s where you’ll usually want it to start anyway, but it seems like a needless limitation. Weirdly, typed text has to start at the left-hand side of the page. If you insert photos, you can automatically select, resize and move them. Better yet, you don’t need to switch to a lasso tool to move some page objects. Photos, drawings, and writing can be as close or as far apart as you like. Notability isn’t as strict with its page structure you can view all the pages as one contiguous whole, which is handy. I chose an A4 page-size with narrowly ruled lines. As with GoodNotes, notes take the form of page and Notability also offers a powerful template capability. Notability organises notes with subjects and dividers. # Chocolate fudge brownies using Notability Taking hand-written notes with Notability All the tools were easy to find, and rearranging the pages was really intuitive and convenient. The loupe means that I can create small, neat handwriting. I can pick out key moments and zoom in to the particular one I want to look at more closely. They don’t lose their detail in their smaller form. The screenshots are smaller, but that’s okay because I can pinch and zoom in.