iAnnotate 4
Make your mark with a comprehensive scrawler
$9.99 Developer Branchfire, iannotate.com Platform Universal Requirements iOS 8.0 or later
Although the iPad seemed originally positioned for media consumption, it’s now a popular productivity tool, and marking up image files and signing PDF documents is a common task. That’s what iAnnotate 4 is designed to tackle, but despite a comprehensive set of features, the user interface is in need of further refinement.
On the plus side, iAnnotate 4 introduces multitasking and native display support for both iPad Pro models, as well as for Apple Pencil, which makes the app’s slender, customizable toolbars easier to navigate. The tool icons tend to be a little on the small side, so Apple Pencil support is a real boost.
For the first time, iAnnotate can also be used on iPhone, but it’s a compromise at best. In portrait view, the truncated toolbar runs along the bottom of the screen, requiring users to open the stack in order to see every tool. Things get even more cramped when you open the Toolbox to customize which icons appear there, with most of the category header text completely chopped off.
When it comes to markup and sharing, however, iAnnotate 4 performs well. Annotations include shapes, photos, or voice recordings as well as more traditional pen, highlighter, typewriter, and stamp tools, with an unlimited number of documents open in tabs at the same time. About the only thing missing is a crop tool, although in a pinch you can use Capture Image to chop things down to size and save the results.
The file browser is a little on the mammoth side, but at least iAnnotate 4 connects with cloud storage services Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and OneDrive (personal or business), as well as iCloud Drive. Users can also capture web pages to a PDF file and mark them up, although this tends to be a long process with graphics-heavy sites.
There are a few things left to address: annotations can’t be copied and pasted, nor can documents be viewed in a list. Files and folders appear as a comically oversized grid of icons, with truncated names that make it difficult to know if you’re opening the right one. Also missing is offline sync – there’s currently no way to manualy download files from the cloud.
the bottom line. An exhaustive toolbox, but the user interface remains a work in progress.