If you tried to take notes on the iPad in the past, you will have come across a few problems. One was that, if you used a stylus, then your hand would always smear your ink. That is, whenever you rested your hand on the screen to write, it would register a touch. The Apple Pencil cures this completely. Whenever you use thr Pencil, the iPad ignores input from your hand. This lets you use the iPad just like a sheet of paper, laying your hand down however you like, with no chance of errant marks. Even better, the iPad can tell the difference between your fingers and your Pencil, so that it can trigger different actions.

The iOS drawing app Linea Sketch , for example, lets you erase the drawing with a finger, without having to select an eraser tool first. Then, the Apple Pencil is pressure sensitive, to better mimic the feel of pen on paper, and can even make different marks based on the angle you hold it at.

The 7 Best Note-Taking Apps for iPad and iPad Pro

In short, the Apple Pencil is a pretty good computer version of a wood-and-graphite pencil. The other part of the equation is lock-screen notes. This makes a huge difference to note-taking with the iPad. Even in the best case, you had to futz with waking the iPad and unlocking it, just to get to the note you were writing a moment before. This was annoying when used alone, but if you were in a meeting, or a class, then it would be distracting for you, and for others.

EXPLORE DRAWING APPS

The new behavior is almost as good as pen and paper. Concepts is the award-winning, advanced sketching and design app for professional creators. With infinite canvas and organic brushes, fluid and responsive vector drawing engine, and intuitive precision tools, your design experience has never felt so natural. Concepts is another iPad Pro app that quickly released a major update following the launch of the second-generation Apple Pencil — double-tap tool switching is supported, plus you can customise how the double-tap manifests itself.

Another one from Serif, Affinity Photo is a fantastic Photoshop alternative on Mac and Windows machines thanks to its solid tool set, amazing performance and one-off price instead of a subscription fee. While it's compatible with earlier iPad models, it's when you pair it with an iPad Pro and Pencil that Affinity Photo really comes alive.

As it's engineered to make the most of the iPad's hardware and touch features, Affinity Photo on the iPad Pro is also built to take full advantage of the Pencil's pressure and angle sensitivity. It's great for tasks from painting with its professional brush engine, or for applying realtime lighting effects. Affinity Photo is built for a professional workflow, with support for raw and PSD files as well as full cross-platform performance and file compatibility in case you feel the need to add some final polish on your desktop. But you probably won't need to. The Adobe Comp CC iPad pro app is a revelation, and makes the process of wireframing or mocking up designs a cinch.

Rather than pulling out your notebook and drawing dumb rectangles for pictures or a few horizontal lines to indicate where text would go in a layout, with a few simple and intuitive sketched shapes you can actually start building those layouts for real — and then pass them into InDesign CC , Illustrator CC or Photoshop CC. It's worth familiarising yourself with all the different gestures for aligning, grouping and so on so you can work quickly and efficiently. You could do all this with just your finger, but using the Pencil feels delightfully like drawing in a notebook with a magical pencil, where birds you draw come to life and fly off the page.

Draw a rectangle, slash it with a diagonal cross and it becomes an image box that you can populate with assets from, say, your Creative Cloud Library. Draw a box and scrub a few horizontal lines in it, and boom, it's a text box, which you can style manually there's also a handy, quick slider control for point size or apply styles to from your CC Libraries. Rough squares snap to perfect geometric shapes. It's fast, fluid and easy, and while sure, pro designers are likely to work from these wireframes like they would with one drawn in ink in a Moleskine — that is, merely referring to it but building from scratch, rather than importing it from Comp — but it can still be a boon to your productivity to be able to quickly mock up your designs using real live assets and styles.

Despite Adobe bringing Illustrator to the iPad, there are some who will swear blind that Graphic remains the best vector drawing app available on iOS. Recent updates arm Graphic with a larger drawing canvas developer Picta claims 16k x 16k , pressure-sensitive drawing with the Apple Pencil, and document tabs. If you're looking for professional desktop-class vector illustration tools right on your iPad Pro, give Graphic a try. The Sharpr team claim that Shapr3D is the only truly mobile CAD app, and that may well be true but it is certainly an expensive one if you subscribe to the Pro version — which is the only way to export your work.

However, marry this app to an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and you will quickly see what you get for your money — a quick, precise way to create 3D models using the same geometric modelling engine as Solidworks.

And it's a cinch to use, too — sketch out a shape, add constraints, pull for an extrude or choose from various tools to make 3D from sketches. Then finish off your work by dragging the edges down for a fillet, and move your edges for freeform surfaces.

This app is deep-designed for Apple Pencil — you will actually need Cupertino's smooth stylus to carry out all of Sharpr's functions. Pared-back it may be, but Sketch is genuinely really good, with not only some lovely natural media types built-in and the option of adding more brushes via Capture CC , but also some features that might quickly endear it to you.

For starters, it can push layered PSDs directly to Photoshop on your Mac or PC, and you can add either a flat grid or even a configurable 3D plane grid to the background, plus preset geometric shapes, to help keep you on the straight and narrow. When you want to go on the wide and sinuous, there are French curves that you can trace against.

But that would be for naught if the natural media tools themselves were rubbish, but in fact they're generally very nice. Pay attention specifically to the watercolour tool, which has colours bleed into one another in a most pleasing manner. What's even nicer is that you can tap an icon — which looks like fan blades — to 'dry' the paint so that new colours added on top don't bleed, giving you some terrific flexibility.

The tools are Pencil-aware, so react wonderfully to pressure and tilt differences, but we are awaiting an update that allows for double-tap compatibility. For some, digital notepads will always come under the "scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should" banner, but those happy to commit to stylus-on-screen experience should try Notability. Notability allows you to combine handwriting, photos and typing, and adds a small but well-integrated selection of drawing tools so you won't be jumping from app to app if you want to sketch.

What makes Notability shine as an Apple Pencil app are those little features like automatic palm rejection, where you can rest your hand on the screen and it won't register as a mark, and straight-line detection, where the app engine will recognise when you are trying to draw a ruled line and straighten it for you. Notability's features exist on a few other note-taking and sketchbook apps, including many on Apple's native Notes app, but its the combination of essential tools in one app combined with lag-free drawing that makes this a great go-to iPad Pro app when you're away from the studio.

In place of Pixelmator , we could have recommended Adobe Photoshop Mix. Although the latter's cut-out tools, layers, and paintable filters are generally quite nice, the stalwart iOS bitmap editor Pixelmator just feels like the more mature and useful app. As well as offering some natural media drawing tools that work with the Pencil, it gives you the ability to tweak the colours either by applying Instagram-style filters, or with sliders for brightness, contrast, saturation, RGB and white balance — or indeed by tweaking the curves.

But the pairing of Pixelmator and the Pencil really shine if you want to do some touch-ups or object isolation. The touch-up controls — repair, dodge, burn, sharpen, saturate and more — are easy to apply with the Pencil especially given its precision. When painting out backgrounds this precision, plus the various different eraser types available, are hugely welcome.

Finally, each note not tag can be color-coded with one of 12 background colors. These colors help differentiate your notes from one another on the slightly cluttered home screen. There are other ways to keep notes top of mind. At the top of a note, tap the bell icon to turn your note into a reminder at a date and time or place of your choosing. You can also pin a note to the top of your home screen using the pin button. Notes can be collaborative too. Tap the three dots on a note and tap Collaborators to add other users to a Keep note, allowing them to edit the note.

You can also send notes from this menu without having to add users as collaborators. Sync takes place for free over Google's own servers, with anything stored eating into your total Google account storage. While technically a note taking app, Drafts 5 offers so much more in its unique approach to typing on your iOS device.

The primary focus is on creating actionable notes, rather than storing anything and everything though you could use it for that too. So what is an actionable note? In this case, it's an email you're drafting, a text message you need to send, a blog post you might be working on, or simply a passage of text that you want to use elsewhere. When you first launch Drafts, you're greeted by a blank canvas where you can start typing.

This is the first major change compared to most note taking apps: Drafts is always ready to go. In no time, you can capture plain text notes and audio recordings. All of your new notes are first stored in your inbox, and from there you can decide what to do with them.

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Organization mostly involves tags, though it's also possible to flag and archive notes. Both flagged and archived notes appear in separate sections for easy perusal. You can search for your notes as you would in any other app, or use Drafts' system of filters for applying multiple tags to a search query. The real magic of Drafts is what happens to your notes once you've written them.

Tap on the Drafts icon in the top-right corner of the screen to see a list of one-tap actions you can perform with your note. These include sending the text to the Messages app, launching a new Mail draft with your text ready to send, or saving your text to Files as a separate file. This doesn't take place via the usual iOS share sheet, but instead instantly sends your text to the app of your choosing.

These actions are varied. You can use Drafts to search Google, create a new Reminder, save to third-party cloud services like OneDrive and Dropbox, compose a Tweet, or create a task in third-party apps like Things and OmniFocus. Not only is Drafts a note taking app on its own, but it's also an extension that plays nicely with some of the other big players like OneNote and Evernote. Take Drafts to the next level with a Pro subscription that allows you to create and edit your own actions, unlock custom icons and themes, use additional widgets and share extensions, and more.

Zoho Notebook is another free note taking platform that strikes a great balance between ease of use and functionality. It's the perfect alternative to Apple Notes for users who don't solely reside within the Apple ecosystem. There are Zoho Notebook apps also available for Android, Mac, and Windows platforms, and they're all free to use. Zoho takes a card-based approach to note capture.

Every note you take is a card, with different cards used for different types of content.

20 Best Note Taking Apps for iPad and iPhone 12222

There are cards for rich text notes, checklists, audio recordings, photos and images, sketches, and files like PDFs. By composing a new text card, you can mix any number of these different elements in a single card. Notebooks with customizable cover images are used to store your cards. It's also possible to deploy tags anywhere within a note by typing a hashtag, then tapping on the tag box that appears.