Journals and notes
Turn sketches into editable images, track key life moments, and more
Carbo $7.99 Platform iPhone, iPad
Among the wide range of apps that can photograph and store your real-world scribbles, Carbo tries something more ambitious than most. Your sketches and notes are cleaned up and converted to vectors, while preserving your original stroke. This means that images within Carbo retain the character of your penmanship, but are also editable in a manner standard photographs are not – you can select and move specific elements that Carbo intelligently groups, adjust line thicknesses throughout an entire image, add tags and annotations, and export the result to various formats. Carbo’s friendly and intuitive to work with, and efficient as well – a typical Carbo note requires only a tenth of the storage as the same image saved as a JPEG.
Paper By Fifty Three Free Platform iPhone, iPad
For a long while, Paper was the iPad’s freemium take on Moleskine notebooks. You drew doodles and flipped through virtual pages to browse them. It has since become free, and been transformed into something different and better. Its original tools are still present, and joined by the means to add text, photos, and checklists. Geometric shapes you scribble can be tidied up, without losing character. These additions make Paper great for all kinds of notes and graphs. Rather than organizing in notebooks, paper stacks explode into walls of sticky notes. Some old hands have grumbled about this, but we love Paper. It’s smarter, simpler, easier to browse, and makes Apple’s Notes look like a cheap knock-off.
Notability $9.99 Platform iPhone, iPad
Of all the iPad’s note-taking apps Notability hits that sweet spot of being usable and feature-rich. You can scribble on its virtual canvas using your finger or a stylus, and if you demand precision, you can drag out text boxes to type into. You can also import docs. One of the smartest features is audio recording, which enables you to record a lecture or meeting, and later play back your notes and the audio together for context.
Day One $4.99 Platform iPhone, iPad
Day One Journal is a brilliant way to keep a digital record of your life. You can include photos and use richly formatted text to make entries appealing to revisit. As your journal grows you can revisit old memories using the builtin search engine, on a calendar, or the map view. On the latter, entries are pinned to their assigned location, so you’ll have no trouble looking up what you wrote about a trip you took to Las Vegas, say.