Noteful for the iPad: complete review

Noteful is a handwriting note-taking app for the iPad and iPhone by Noteful Technologies Ltd. It costs $4.99, a one-time purchase and you can try a free version before purchasing it. You can also use it on M-series MacBooks but not on Intel ones. This review focuses on the paid iPad version of the app. (For those of you guys who are curious about what note-taking app our team uses, it is this one). We have a free course for Noteful on our second YouTube channel, Paperless Humans, if you want to master how to use the app. The developers have been generous enough to support our team so we can make the course free for all Noteful users.

Creating new notebooks

Noteful has a lot of page templates for new notebooks; basic templates, Cornell, Storyboards, music and handwriting templates. We haven’t seen this many music page templates in a handwriting note-taking app. You can customise your page colours to determine its background and line colours. These can be any colour you want. Noteful has some presets you can use, and you can add custom colours to that palette. We love that these are centralised, so you don’t have to change them for each template you want to use, which effectively gives you less work. It’s perfect for a digital workflow. The app has a few page size options, but you also get screen sizes for presentations. That way, you can create the perfect presentations from your handwriting note-taking app. How cool is that?

Your pages can either be portrait or landscape. But what is more important is saving custom templates to the app’s template library. Where most handwriting note-taking apps can only save single pages, Noteful can save complete PDF documents as page templates. That is how we managed to save our digital notebooks and planners in the app. It is one of my favourite features, and I love that I don’t have to import documents each time I need to create a new notebook. The app even allows you to organise your templates. If you use a lot of digital planners and notebooks, reusing them in Noteful is a breeze because you can save the templates and never worry about importing them into the app the next time you want to use a new one. Who else finds that refreshing?

User interface

Noteful strikes a healthy balance between minimalism and functionality. We never thought the two could ever be out of balance until we learnt that sometimes minimalism can be quite dysfunctional. You can move the toolbar to any side of the screen you like. Your tabs can either be at the top or bottom of the screen. We love that it remains anchored to the edge of the screen and that it doesn’t overlap with your notebook. That distinction of spaces on the toolbar keeps me sane. Does anyone else dislike the new trend in handwriting note-taking apps that overlaps toolbars onto notebooks? Or am I the only one?

The toolbar can be dark or light, but in dark mode, the light toolbar turns dark, of course. I failed to get used to the light toolbar, though. The grey icons probably don’t give enough contrast because the few icons on the top toolbar look great. They pop out against the white background. Which toolbar theme do you prefer in Noteful: white or dark? Noteful pioneered the customisable toolbar in handwriting note-taking apps on the iPad. At least it’s the first app we know to have done that, and we are happy to see more apps adopting that. You can have as little as one icon and colour on the toolbar, making the app as minimalist as you want. You can even turn off the iPad status bar for a full-screen effect; wouldn’t recommend it, though. But it’s good to have options.

Pen tool

Noteful has three pen tools: ballpoint, fountain, and brush pens, all with a size range from 0.10 to 5mm. You can save five thicknesses, which is a lot more than most handwriting note-taking apps give us in 2024. Do you guys use a maximum of three pen thicknesses for your notes? Does replacing one of them bother you when you can only save three on the toolbar? You can also customise your pen colour and save as many colours as you like on the toolbar. You can customise your pen colours from a grid, wheel, colour picker and even hex code. That’s all the options for picking your colours covered.

Noteful has one of the most versatile pen tools you can find in a handwriting note-taking app. That is because the developers have added a lot of fine-tuning features to give us different writing experiences with each tool, depending on how we customise them. The ballpoint pen has a motion-smoothing feature. When set to zero, you get the basic ballpoint pen you have in most handwriting note-taking apps. Yes, the one I dislike. But, at its maximum, the ballpoint is smoother, looks better, and by far, becomes the best ballpoint pen we have ever tried. When set right, you get the best ballpoint pen you can ever use in a handwriting note-taking app.

Pressure sensitivity is a basic feature for fountain and brush pens. It makes the pen tool sensitive to how hard you press against your iPad screen when writing. The harder you press, the thicker the pen stroke, naturally. In Noteful, you can also determine how thin your tips get for both the fountain and brush pen. At its minimum, your pen tips are only 10% of the rest of the thickness. At 100%, your pen stroke is not tapered enough, obviously. But you can play around the range to find a perfect look that works for you.

You can also customise how smooth the stroke widths are. At zero, the fountain pen looks and feels like the ballpoint in Noteshelf. That’s the best description we can give, but we are not sure how to describe the brush pen. We adjusted the width smoothing to 100% and brought down pressure sensitivity, but we still couldn’t describe what the brush pen looks like. The fountain pen looks thicker the more you play around with that option, but it’s difficult to appreciate what the feature actually does.

Motion smoothing depends adjusts how much effort you put into handwriting in the app. At zero, handwriting is very easy and takes the least effort. But, if you prefer a bit of resistance in your writing, you can add more motion smoothness. For me, at six, I have to put the same amount of effort I do in Goodnotes. It just tires me faster, and I write less in the app. Motion smoothing is better to appreciate with the brush pen. With that much personalisation, Noteful unlocks the most handwriting experience potential we have seen in a handwriting note-taking app on the iPad. The trick is to figure out the best combination that works for you.

My ideal pen tool is a fountain pen at 0.25mm with level 1 pressure sensitivity, 10% minimum width, and width smoothing. I use level 2 for motion smoothing. If you’re using Noteful, let me know what settings you use for your pen so I can try them. All your pen tools can be dashed or dotted. So, if you like using those tools, Noteful’s got you covered.

Highlighter tool

You have one highlighter in Noteful, and like your pen tools, you can save five thicknesses for it. It comes with a different colour palette from the one for your pens, which we always appreciate. Who else uses different colours for pens and highlighters? It goes behind your ink, so it doesn’t dim your notes if you layer it. You can use the freehand or straight highlighter, and that covers all the features you need for a decent highlighter tool in a handwriting note-taking app.

Favourites toolbar

The colour palette for your pen and highlighter tools doubles as the favourites toolbar. We appreciate the developers’ dedication to minimalism. Your favourite pens and highlighters have a number on them. That’s how you tell them apart from simple colours. Considering how complicated it is to personalise your pen tools in Noteful, you will truly appreciate having a favourites toolbar. The developers have centralised the pen tool settings, though, so when you change them, they affect all your pen tools, including your favourite ones. You, therefore, don’t need to customise them for each tool, saving you a lot of time. For your favourite pen tools, you save their colour, width, pen and stroke type. For the highlighter tool, only their width.

The handwriting experience in Noteful is awesome, especially with the perfect pen tool. There is no lag, but palm rejection is still not perfect. It has improved over the years, but you will get that occasional shake or zoom level change when you rest your palm to start writing. The zoom tool helps, but if you don’t mind using it. I have made peace with this issue; I hardly notice it anymore until I have to review the app for you guys where I have to check if it is still happening. For those using Noteful, have you also got used to it?

Eraser tool

The eraser tool has five fixed sizes that you can’t adjust. The range is decent, and it doesn’t matter because you can erase per stroke or pixel. The pixel eraser is not very smooth, but it gets the job done. Choosing a bigger size for your eraser solves that problem instantly. In Noteful, you can selectively erase a couple of items in your notes; highlighter, shapes and tape only. That way, you won’t have to worry about accidentally erasing something you need. Auto-deselect automatically reverts to the tool you were using before the eraser. It’s a feature a lot of note-takers love, though I am still to understand why.

Zoom tool

The zoom tool in Noteful has an impressive range, and we like that is zooms out to the page width. For those of us who don’t really like the zoom tool, at full width, it’s not bad considering that it helps with palm rejection, right? You can adjust the palm rest below your zoom tool and even the zoomed section in your notebook. The zoom window toolbar has your writing tools, and you can even customise them from there. Your writing tools are readily available if your toolbar is at the top or bottom of the screen. You won’t need them when it’s on the left side, like mine. The app lets you remove them from the toolbar if you don’t want to see them.

You can move the zoom window using the navigation arrows on the zoom toolbar. Dragging and moving it is probably faster, but auto-advance is even faster. It is also accurate, so you won’t waste adjusting it. To make it move to a certain part of the page on a new line, you can add a margin. The zoom tool in Noteful supports left-handed and right-to-left writing, which we haven’t seen in any other note-taking app.

You can also zoom in directly on the page and the app’s zooming range is impressive. It is the widest we have seen so far, and we’d probably appreciate it more if we had it displayed on the screen. The app snaps to fit the page to the screen width and also at the normal page width. Locking our zoom level would be helpful, especially to improve the palm rejection issue. So, we hope the developers can add that for us.

Adding items to your notes

Shapes

Noteful supports regular and irregular shapes, which you can adjust after drawing them. You can easily resize and rotate your shapes. The app lets you change the border colour, thickness, and type for your shapes. It also supports autofill, even if it shares the same colour with your border. We are still waiting for the option to make the two different. Lastly, you can adjust the opacity of the entire shape.

Tape

Tape is a handy tool for students or anyone trying to learn something. It lets you cover a part of your notes and reveal the answers with a single tap. The tape in Noteful comes in three types. You get your freehand, straight and rectangular one. Chances are, you will find one that works for you. You can then choose the size for it from 5 options and a pattern, which is basically its colour. You can even use custom colours for your tape, if you like. The eraser is also selective for the tape. So, you can erase only the tape without deleting your notes. We love that because it makes it easy to correct mistakes, in the case you cover the wrong part of your notes.

Text boxes

Your text goes into a text box that disappears when you stop typing. You can change the font, its size and colour. Formatting makes your text bold, italic, underlined, or strikeout. Noteful also styles your text boxes to add background colour, change border thickness and style, or even adjust its opacity. You also get alignment and line spacing options. Text boxes in Noteful are fun to play with.

You can resize and rotate your text boxes. The app can also save one favourite style for the text box. We look forward to saving more styles in the future. The app supports web links to your notes, though they are not well dressed. At least you can add web links, it’s better than not having the feature at all.

Images and stickers

Images are a must-have for a note-taking app. Digital notes are just not complete without diagrams, right? You can add images from Photos, take some with your camera, or drag and drop them into the app from anywhere. You can then crop your images freely or as a rectangle. Resizing it gives you rotation options as well. You can add a frame to your image. The frames look cooler with freehand-cropped images. You can also determine your frame colour and the opacity of the images.

Noteful supports the stickers features in iPadOS 17. You can add stickers using the text box feature by accessing them from the native keyboard. This means you can use any stickers that you have purchased to use on your iPad in Noteful, without a problem. The stickers are easy to add. You can resize and rotate them. All that makes for decent stickers.

Audio recordings

You can record audio while taking handwritten notes in Noteful. We’re still waiting for the developers to extend the feature to text. You can rename, delete, or export your recordings out of the app. Playback can rewind or fast-forward 10 seconds at a time, as well as speed up or slow it down. You can also skip through the audio by tapping sections in your synced notes.

Tags

You can tag your pages in Noteful. Tags in the app are universal. You can access them for any notebook. They are perfect for bookmarking pages you want to access from the home page.

Page layers

Layers are easily our favourite feature in Noteful. They add a layer of complexity to digital notes that we love. We’ve compared them to flashcards, but they can be so much more! The ability to compartmentalise notes has many applications.

Lasso tool

The lasso tool in Noteful can pick up specific items on your pages; handwriting, highlights, text boxes, or images and shapes. You can also pick any combination you like. It is exactly what you would expect from a lasso tool in 2023. You can also take a screenshot of your notes, group them or arrange them. The app can put items in front or at the back of other items on the page. For your handwritten notes, you can change their colour.

iPadOS support

• Multitasking with multiple instances can open the same notebook twice. You can also open multiple tabs to read even more documents at once.
• Scribble is the only handwriting conversion you get in the app.
• Dark mode still does not convert your pages. When switching between dark and light modes, your paper and ink stay the same.

Page editing

For faster navigation, you can view all the pages of your document. Zooming out fits more pages on one screen, making it easier to scroll through. Zooming in lets you see more details to confirm the pages you’re looking for. You can select multiple pages to copy, rotate, tag, delete, extract, share, or rearrange them. Noteful supports both vertical and horizontal scrolling.

Noteful can recognise and edit document outlines in your PDFs. The app also lets you create your outlines from scratch, which you can nest. This feature will be perfect once we can export the outlines we create.

With outlines and tags, you probably won’t need bookmarks as much. The app still has them, though; you can name and arrange them if you like.

Search tool

Noteful only searches through your text. It does not search through your handwriting. The app displays your search results (and their pages) on a pop-up sidebar. That’s the most ideal way to display search results, isn’t it?

Universal search on the app’s homepage searches through your notebook titles and tags. We’re still waiting for the ability to search through the contents of our documents as well.

Organisation

Noteful organises your notes with folders and tags, both of which support infinite organisational levels. You can pin notebooks for easier access, and they can display as lists or thumbnails. You can resize your thumbnails, which is cool. The app auto backs up to Google Drive only in two different formats. You can choose to exclude some tags from your backup.

Verdict

Noteful is our team’s go-to note-taking app, and we absolutely love it because it is the next best alternative to Goodnotes 6 and Notability. However, its lack of handwriting conversion and search might put some note-takers off. But it has a free trial, so you can try it before purchasing.