5 handwriting apps for note-taking on iOS

By GizBot Bureau

| Published: Friday, July 20, 2018, 17:58 [IST]

If you enjoy mixing words and sketches, the regular options that are available won’t be able to satisfy you, in order to spice it up a little and make your note a little less boring, you will need to get your hands on a stylus as well as a digital handwriting app to go with it. Though not designed for it, it might be a good idea to mess around with the Apple Notes’ inbuilt handwriting and sketching features. A similar feature is available for OneNote users as well. If you are an Evernote fan, you can make use of Penultimate in order to write something.

Paper

Paper is a very polished app and it comes equipped with three default notebooks or journals. You can go through the tools that are available to you in Paper Tools. You can access any of the journals to test out the tools yourself.

You can adjust the stylus and other app settings in the top-right corner behind the slider icon.

You can also choose a journal cover from any of the eight options that are available.

Inkflow Visual Notebook

Though the app doesn't have quite the color palette like Paper. It still does a fantastic job by letting you intersperse your sketches with text and photos. You can also move and resize all of the text and photos by using the marquee-select tool. You can look under the Stationery section of the Share menu to find options that let you replace the white background with blank or ruled pages, grid lines or music staff.

Notability

Designed to work with Apple pencil, this robust paid app will let you take notes and annotate PDFs on your iPad by using a stylus.

You can also draw by making use of this app. This includes creating precise or free-form shapes, moving objects around, adding color and more.

Pages

It might seem odd to see Apple's Pages app here since taking notes is Apple Notes' job. But the fantastic text and drawing tools make it a great tool for note-taking. To test out the drawing tools, create a new Pages document and tap the Plus button in the toolbar. The next thing that you need to do is go to the last tab (Media) and then click on Drawing. You will see a black canvas as well as a range of drawing tools at the bottom. You can go ahead and test them all out.

Bamboo Paper

This app was developed by Wacom, the Bamboo stylus maker. You do not need to own a stylus to do the job though you can get a much superior handwriting experience by using the app. Bamboo Paper has a high degree of precision and it comes packed with a handful of brushes that add a lot of nuance to the sketches.

In addition to options that allow you to add text and photos to your notes, you also have the option of exporting notes to cloud services and social networking sites.

This app is available on both Android and Windows tablets as well in addition to iPad.