Notability 9
More power to your Pencil
$11.99 From Ginger Labs Inc, gingerlabs.com Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 11.0 or later
Notability is one of the most fully featured note– taking apps you can buy on iOS. It enables you to create and edit notes that combine text, images, handwriting, illustrations, audio recordings, and imported files such as MP3s and common office files. It has a quick search feature that even searches handwritten text, and it works with a wide range of cloud services including Dropbox, WebDAV servers, OneDrive, and Google Drive.
There are three key improvements in version 9: shapes, partial eraser, and better image control. Shapes enables you to draw circles, ellipses, triangles and other regular and irregular shapes that you can manipulate. If your drawing skills aren’t brilliant, lines within a shape can automatically snap to the start point.
As the name suggests, the partial eraser can erase parts of things. It can be used freehand and to get rid of entire shapes, and if you turn a shape into individual strokes they can then be moved and manipulated as objects in their own right. And the improved image control makes it easier to rotate and crop images.
The handwriting support is particularly good. By default, handwriting remains as scribbles on your screen, but it’s automatically recognized and made searchable. You can also convert handwritten text to typed text. The Apple Pencil is fully supported, but you can happily handwrite with a cheap stylus too.
Some of our favorite features are the smallest ones. A word count means it can be used as a writing app as well as a note one, the note switcher makes navigation fast and easy, and being able to lock your notes with TouchID/FaceID is handy.
This app is fast, very easy to use, and the ability to import files such as DOC, PPT and PDF means it’s useful in a corporate environment as well as an educational one. THE BOTTOM LINE. Notability is clever, capable, and exceptionally useful.