Notability
A near-perfect notes app
$5.99 From Ginger Labs, gingerlabs.com Made for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch Needs iOS 10.0 or later
If you’re looking for a reliable note– taking app that works with Apple Pencil, enables you to convert handwriting to searchable, editable text, imports PDFs, and syncs with the companion Mac app via iCloud, you should buy Notability. It’s simple to use but packed with useful features, and crucially the app doesn’t get in your way when you want to capture an idea.
Notability is designed for two kinds of jobs: creating notes and annotating existing documents. For the latter you can input PDF, DOC, and PPT files as well as Excel spreadsheets, text files, and images — the DropBox import is particularly handy. You can share via AirDrop, DropBox, Google Drive, Box, and OneDrive, you can drag and drop into other apps and you can also drag and drop between two Notability notes, which is really useful.
It’s worth pointing out that with PDFs you can annotate, highlight, and copy content but you can’t edit it, so it’s great for commenting on or signing PDF documents, for example, but you can’t replace any of the text unless you draw over the top of it. The note organization is fairly limited too: you can group notes by subject or by subject dividers, but you can’t use the same title twice. Therefore, if you have a divider called “research”, you can’t have another divider labelled the same elsewhere.
Where Notability really shines in its audio recording, which can be used to add voice notes to a document. In a nice touch you can add annotations as you record, and they’ll appear at the appropriate point during playback. If you want to share your recordings, you can export your entire note in a zip file containing either a PDF or RTF file and your audio.
Notability doesn’t need Apple Pencil — we got perfectly decent handwriting recognition with our finger and with cheap styluses — but it’s elevated when using one. The sketching and highlighting tools are great and handwriting is a joy. Text recognition is the icing on the cake. the bottom line. Notability is the notes app that your devices were made for.