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![]() Selecting the search entry takes you straight to that occurrence as per any standard typed-text search. It works on the device in isolation, which I tested by killing the WiFi, writing something then searching for the text I’d just written. GN4 then does a real-time handwriting recognition search through the workbook and highlights in yellow all instances it found of the text. Open a workbook and select the ellipsis in the top right corner then “Search” and type in the text you want to find. Ultimately though that’s not what hooked me. You can also import content from other iCloud Drive sources, Photos or the Camera directly. There are options to sync your content via iCloud which works fine between my iPhone 6S+, iPad Pro and Macbook Pro, but also includes Import/Export options for Google Drive, OneDrive Box and DropBox as well as using DropBox for Automatic backup beyond iCloud if you so wish. There’s shape recognition which I found to be passable but Grafio does a far better job as does OneNote. A second tap for those drawing implements with colour selectivity brings up a palette with line thickness control as well. Swiping between pages is easy with a two-finger slide left or right, with pinch to zoom works as expected plus there’s a handy zoom in close function for fine work that all worked nicely and were quite polished compared to the standard Apple Notes app.Ī single tap along the top selects your drawing implement be it a stylus as a pen, a highlighter, an eraser or to enable the handy Lasso tool for selecting areas of your notes and cut/copy/paste/resize them as required. My two favourites I use are Standard (A4) because that’s the standard in Australia, and I always choose between Narrow Ruled (if I’m writing a lot of words), Narrow and Quad Ruled (aka graph paper for sketching diagrams) or just Plain (just for freehand sketching). The first page (and each subsequent can be added prior or after any page you’re on quite easily) gives you options for different paper sizes with pre-ruled and graph-style papers. Being me, I stuck with the default cover: Simple Blue. When you create a Notebook you can choose several different kinds of Covers with options ranging from Bright, Calm, Dark, Enclosed, Plain and Simple: each with a subset of interesting patterns. GoodNotes 4 allows you to create Categories for your notes starting you off with “Uncategorised” and “Trash” but I simply added Work and Home and went with those. I’d researched a lot of software and after watching several how-to videos forked out the $7.99USD ($12.99AUD) for the iOS and shortly thereafter another $7.99 for the Mac version because it blew me away so completely. I’d spent a week or two of work with my iPad Pro just prior to Christmas and used Notes and it was fine, except it began to mirror my real-world notes problems: they were an unsearchable, poorly indexed mess but at least I could look at them wherever I was without having to drag my engineering notebook everywhere with me. Maybe it’s coming someday but for now, OneNote can’t help me. I need something that works locally on the device. The advantage of that method is it’s genuine image OCR and it should therefore work for any image of sufficient quality in the OneNote document (more on why that matters later) but it requires the server side and that’s a problem for me in my use case. They suggest 5 minutes but I’ve waited hours. ![]() The problem is that in my office environment access to the servers is firewalled and I have to tether to get external access to my OneDrive for OneNote sync and Microsoft do OCR on the notes on the server side, feeding the results back to the document when they’re done. ![]() Being able to search that handwritten text would be a dream come true. ![]() OCR is becoming quite common and honestly with support now in OneNote it’s becoming very mainstream as Microsoft are leveraging their decades of experience with pen support.Īpple don’t have a native solution for it on iOS and whilst I recognise that typing will always be significantly faster than handwriting, in engineering I spend a significant amount of my time making hand-written notes and drawing diagrams with a reasonable amount of text. Maybe I’m asking too much but this isn’t the days of the Palm Pilot where I learned to write in “Graffiti” one letter at a time. It has one big drawback though: there’s no OCR and with it no searchability. Naturally the Notes app on the iPad itself has been optimised for the Pencil, and it shows with excellent pressure sensitivity and tilt support with some of the cleanest lines you’d like to see. The iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil are amazing products but they aren’t any good without good software that supports their hardware features. ![]()
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