Napkin

Take ideas from your brain to the page with consummate ease

£29.99 Developer Aged & Distilled, aged-and-distilled.com

Requires OS X 10.9 or higher, 64-bit processor

Armed with an elegant set of markup tools, Napkin allows anyone to convey ideas or explain concepts in a more ambitious way than words alone.

For starters, you can draw lines or shapes with a mouse and Napkin will convert those scribbles into clean, vector-based arrows, text boxes or callouts. These can be embellished by importing images from your Mac or using the built-in screenshot feature to grab some or all of the display.

You can crop, pixelate or blur imported images in the app itself, while sharing your final creation is also easy thanks to the Share menu and the ability to drag and drop JPEG or PNG versions between apps.

Napkin makes short work of creating callouts. Draw around the area you want to draw the viewer’s attention to, click to lock it, then drag it into position. Arrows drawn between objects retain links when one is moved, and smart guides make it easy to reposition elements.

The app is priced at £29.99 and you can’t try before you buy. The cost of admission feels exorbitant compared to free markup apps like Skitch – that is, until you spend time with Napkin and realise what an effortless timesaver it really is.

However, there’s no way to import PDF files, and keyboard jockeys will lament the lack of shortcuts while taking screenshots. J.R. Bookwalter

Napkin has a range of tools to get your message across with the minimum amount of effort. Don’t let the price fool you: Napkin is our new go-to markup app and well worth the investment. Fast, simple image markup Plenty of useful features Expensive;...