Most updates are rarely exciting these days. It seems most developers are just maintaining apps to keep them running smoothly. The surprising thing is that the update I’m excited about is not even a new feature; it’s an improvement to THE MOST BASIC FEATURE IN A NOTE-TAKING APP!
Noteful just released an update for its pen tools. At first glance, it’s a simple, minor update on pen settings. But because of the course we’re doing on Paperless Humans, I had to check it to see if the changes meant we had to update the episode covering the pen tool. The location of the new settings is not ideal. Perhaps a settings icon would be better, so we don’t assume it’s just some information explaining what the tool does. The app now adjusts three features for the pen tool: writing pressure, minimum width, and width smoothing, which we don’t even know what it means.
For you to appreciate just how dramatic the change is, I am going to show you some notes that I already have in the app. This was the best writing I could get before. Now, after playing around with the new settings: look what I am getting!
Handwriting experience, for me, is the main determining factor of whether or not I use an app. All other features follow after it. Before this update, I think the best handwriting in a note-taking app was in Notability. But this engine in Noteful surpasses that, which is impressive. It looks like I wrote these in two different apps.
Who would have thought that an update so basic could have such a huge impact? Here is our ranking of the best handwriting experience you’ll get on the iPad with the Apple Pencil (from the best to the worst):
- Noteful
- Notability
- Apple Notes
- Noteshelf
- ZoomNotes
- GoodNotes
