How are you liking iPadOS 13 so far? Notability just released an update to support it. Let’s see what they’ve done.
In all the technical ways in existence at the moment, Notability has always had dark mode options. The app had a dark theme and some dark-mode paper templates.
I will be comparing dark mode in Notability to that in Apple’s Notes. Their approaches are very different, which has me talking about true and false dark modes.
When I create notes on a dark-mode paper template, the white ink looks amazing. I love it. The contrast is certainly welcome. However, when exporting the notes without the paper template, the white ink disappears. It reappears when I turn on the page background.
Dark mode in Notability hasn’t affected my notes. They all still look the same. Only the user interface changes, which I am very happy about. I have too many notes in Notability to worry about any unwanted changes.
True dark mode doesn’t really exist yet in third party handwriting note-taking apps.
The undo and redo three-finger gestures are working in Notability. Swipe with 3 fingers to the left to undo. Swipe to the right to redo. This is a game changer for Notability especially. Some people found the long press feature to access the redo function in the app an inconvenience. At the end of the day, every second counts (if you use the feature a lot).
Notability can now search through text in your photos. Impressed! With this option available, I doubt scanning documents is even necessary. You can if you want to though since the app supports the feature.
Scanning in Notability is not that impressive. The scan looks more like a photo than a PDF scan. Searching for the scan was a hit-and-miss. The feature is not as accurate as the one in GoodNotes 5. Searching through your photos is more reliable than searching through a scanned PDF in Notability.
This update also fixed the PNG image problem we have been having in the app for a while now. Notability is finally supporting PNG files again. You just can’t drag-and-drop them into the app yet. When adding a PNG image to your notes, you have to use the importing tool. There is always something broken about the PNG image support feature in Notability.
Notability has had in-app split view for months now. The app still supports this feature independent of iPadOS, which is different from what GoodNotes 5 is doing. In Notability, you have one user interface for both documents. Therefore, the app does not open twice.
I wonder if Notability plans on adopting the iPadOS approach. Being unable to open the app in multiple windows is a massive drawback for the application.
However, Notability’s in-app split view supports any ratio you want. Not just the three standard ones supported by iPadOS. It supports all the ratios between those three standard ones. That could be useful for someone.
