It’s been three years since we made our Apple Notes wish list for the iPad… and honestly, maybe it’s time we let it go.
Sure, we’ve ticked off some items — but so many critical features still haven’t been brought to iPadOS 26. At some point, you just wonder… when do we stop hoping?
We still don’t have vector ink for the pen tools. Which means… still no zooming for our pages. When you export your notes as PDF, you won’t run away from turning them into a blurry mess if you try to zoom in on them from other apps.
Text colour? Only if you’re using a highlighter, which is not the same thing as text colour anyway. So, we’re stuck with black, even with the new macOS-style menu bar. It honestly isn’t bringing much to the table — we can only hope that it’s laying the groundwork for richer formatting tools.
The floating toolbar is better in beta 3, though. Icons are darker, more visible. The transparency isn’t as annoying as before. So that’s something.
The combination of the floating toolbar and the new menu bar feels awkward on such a small screen like the iPad. The menu bar obviously can’t get any bigger than that, no matter how much we want it to. It’ll just eat into our precious screen real estate. Definitely not worth it, considering that it really has nothing new to offer.
Let’s talk about that new sidebar. It looks a lot better with the big text, but with small text… It is bold. It’s loud, so it’s in your face. And… I don’t like it.
I miss the soft yellow icons. They were subtle, minimalist — and easy on the eyes. I even tried to make the text smaller and it’s still not working for me. It looks much better but, lately, even the default text is feeling a little small. I’ve increased my text size for all my apps to try work through everything faster.
With the default font size; everything on the screen is screaming for attention. The sidebar is competing with our notes. It looks and feels cluttered. Since this is my go-to app, I can’t just drop it for that, so I’ve started taking more notes on the iPhone. The bigger font is also working great.
Back to the wishlist again: table editing is still a pain. Rows and columns? Still fixed. Adding cells? Still too much work. No change here in iPadOS 26.
What has changed? Mainly the interface. The new vertical pop-up menu is cleaner, better organised — and actually quite intuitive.
There’s also support for right-to-left writing. I can’t try it myself because I genuinely don’t know how, but if you use it, let us know if it works well. Why wouldn’t it, though? Besides that it’s currently in beta, of course.
Now for something I did get excited about: the new reed calligraphy pen. It’s beautiful. It supports different stroke angles and feels really nice. Is it just me, or do all those angles look the same? I suppose you’d have to be somewhat of a calligraphy expert to appreciate the subtle differences.
But… it’s too thick. Unless you’re using it for headers or titles, it’s simply to thick and that’s a bit of a letdown.
One thing that did make me smile — Markdown export. Finally! If you’ve ever needed to share your typed notes in Markdown, this is a huge win. It’s probably the most useful features in iPadOS 26. But, the app exports the notes in a folder, so you can’t export them directly to other apps. You need to save them to Files first, which is tiring if you do it often.
But then… Apple removed multiple instances from iPadOS. What? Why?
Windowed apps are fine — I like them. But I thought they were an extra option for multi-tasking on the iPad, not a replacement for multiple instances. Now I can’t just drag an app into split view like before. That’s a serious blow to multitasking. At this point, Apple should just leave multitasking for the iPad alone. They keep messing it up!
So, in the end… none of the Apple Notes changes in iPadOS 26 actually help my workflow. What I do get is a new UI to adjust to, and multitasking that feels more like a downgrade.
I’m perfectly annoyed.
If you’re trying out the beta too, I hope your experience has been better. Tell us about it in the comments — we’d love to know what’s working for you.
