Using iPad for real work – notes…
Can I take notes on my iPad during meetings?
The built-in Notes app on the iPad is becoming a powerful tool for organisation. Apple has slowly added features that could help it compete against more popular note-taking apps like OneNote and Evernote. I used Evernote for many years, before moving to Apple Notes. To be honest, this decision was because it was easy with iCloud to keep my Notes synchronised between my MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPad, and iPhone. I just don’t need to thinking about “where” I am making notes, because they are sync’ed and available on all devices.
But when it comes to using my iPad Pro, for real work, one thing I would like is to be writing notes in meetings etc. Using the Folio keyboard with the iPad is too awkward – not the usual keyboard feel, and a bit small.
So what about writing with the Apple Pencil?
There are lots of writing apps out there, but as a first step I want to see how good Notes can be for this.
First thing I like here is that I can type in a note, draw something in the same note, and then continue typing. It’s easy too – just tap the pen icon in the lower-right corner and start drawing, and tap the X icon in the same place to revert to typing.
I was hoping Notes could convert my scribbles to text – so maybe I can then copy and paste to an email later. But Notes doesn’t do that (OCR) yet. However it IS possible to search through my handwritten notes ! Cool!
My handwritten scrawl (I don’t have neat hand-writing) are now indexed with Spotlight. I can type a word or phrase in the Spotlight box (on my iPad, iPhone or MacBooks) and see notes listed that contain the handwritten version of what you typed in Spotlight. Clever.
This is certainly a great start, and gives me an additional reason to use the iPad Pro, productively, in a business setting. And of course it’s free as it’s included in macOS, ipadOS, iOS, etc.
This could be “good enough”.
However, I think I will investigate some apps that can convert my writing to text – that would be ever better 🙂
- H5P periodic table – 8th September 2023
- Moodle 4.0 – 15th May 2022
- Moodle 4.0 other highlights – 14th May 2022
