Thanks to its thin and light design, Apple’s iPad Pro is a great note taking tool when combined with the optional Apple Pencil but which is the best of the seemingly endless list of note and writing apps on the AppStore?
Apple’s default Notes app is a good place to start if you just want to take a few quick notes but the current version is limited to just one pen type and a single sheet of paper which makes it unsuitable for long meetings or detailed notes.
Many Apple Pencil users really like Paper which is a free download from the AppStore. However, while it offers more pen types, it suffers from the same single page limitation as Notes so doesn’t really excite us.
If you’re looking to combine written notes with audio, Notebook from Zoho Corporation is a simple to use app which will work not just with your Pencil but also with your Apple Watch.
But for us there’s one app which blows all competition out of the water and it comes from the daddy of all note-taking brands: Moleskine.
Like the other apps listed above, Moleskine is free but it has a number of features we really love, including that it offers not just a single page to take your notes on but entire journals.
The app opens into a book shelf screen which includes a choice of blank journals with various paper types – plain, ruled, squared, storyboard and weekly planner.
You can create as many of these free journals as you like and the ability to name them means you can have one per project or course.
There are also some optional paid-for journals including ones for recipes and travellers.
Open a journal and you have a choice of a paint brush, pencil, ballpoint and highlighter, a simple slider to increase or decrease the ink’s thickness and a handy colour wheel.
You can also easily change the paper type if you change your mind, and import photos from the iPad’s camera app.
For us the app’s choice and speedy, lag free performance makes it the best of the pick – especially for business users wanting to project a serious image in meetings – and the user experience is so immersive that you can quickly forget you’re writing on a glass screen and not in a paper book.