SlideMagic Blog

I now have almost completely eliminated paper from my workflow after I switched to hand writing on the iPad. My meeting notes are better organized and searchable, and I can now make design doodles in multiple colors on which it is much easier to erase part of your sketch. I have tested 3 iPad styli extensively and the best one is the Adonit Jot:

• The Cosmonaut is a cute, beautifully designed, fat pen that resembles a whiteboard marker. Nice for my kids to draw, but not suitable for writing or precision drawing. The fat tip makes it impossible to see what you are writing. I am also not a big fan of the rubbery material on the outside.
• The Wacom stylus is built of quality materials, feels nice and light and writes comfortably. A close second. The soft tip wears off quickly.
• The Adonit Jot is my favorite. A small, flat, transparent disk protects your screen while giving completely visibility what you are doing. A very nice, heavy build quality. The disk makes a clacking sound when you write, some if you might find this inappropriate in meetings with other people. I bought the Flip version that has a pen on the back (which I actually never use).

I did extensive research on the web before buying my own styli, and discovered that there is a huge difference in personal preferences. So you are likely to buy a few before finding the one that fits you best. (The links in this posts are affiliate links).

I have been trying electronic pencils for years and years: different 3rd party iPad styli (is that the correct plural?), the previous Apple pencil itself and previous solutions by Wacom. None of these worked good enough for me to get rid of my note book.

I think has changed with the latest Apple pencil that works on a 2018 iPad Pro. The updated pencil solved a few annoyances when compared to the previous one:

• It snaps to your device (but still falls of in your bag)
• When snapped, it charges, no more need to stick it in the iPad connected
• It no longer rolls
• It has a matt finish and feels nicer to work with

The biggest issue though used to be work flow, with 2 poor options:

• Log into your sleeping iPad all the time when you want to jot something though in a meeting
• Keep your notes app running all the time and thereby letting the graphics intensive app drain your iPad battery.

That has been solved by a feature buried in the settings of the Apple Notes app: a simple double tap of the pencil on the screen wakes up the Notes app. The iPad is still locked as a security precaution, you can set the time it takes for the iPad to open a new note instead of displaying the last note you were writing to anyone who taps the screen.

Photo by Kim Gorga on Unsplash

Over the years I have written many reviews of styli and iPad note taking apps on this blog. I am a heavy user of notes:

• Jotting down things during client presentation briefings. A very small part of this is actually to make sure I do not forget certain things (a correction on page 53, the total market for home insurance). For the most part I find that when I write things down, I remember them better. I actually never look back at the notes.
• The second big use of a note pad is to draw sketches for charts. Almost every chart with a sketch.

Up until now, I have not found a good alternative to pencil and paper:

• Tapping on laptops (and iPad screen keyboards) disrupts the flow of a meeting (you look like a note taking clerk)
• Styli were physically unpleasant to work with (too small, too fat)
• Handwriting recognition on iPad was not optimal (small strokes, palm interference).

The iPad Pro (I have the 9.7" version) and Apple Pencil changed a lot. I actually use the device now in meetings and leave my note book and pencil at home. I tried Apple Notes, Penultimate, and Paper by 53. Of these, Penultimate suits me best in meetings. Everything syncs to Evernote (they got me locked in), nice and fat pen strokes, and easy to add pages and scroll over your notes. The big issue has now become battery life. Watch out in long meetings where you leave the screen on for a long time.

The inevitable is happening: tablets get more powerful, screens get bigger, and we are getting pressure sensitive screens and a stylus. What are the implications for office applications and presentation design?

I think the big screen is the most important factor here, not a stylus. Until now, tablets screens were too cramped for design work. More breathing space makes for a more manageable user interface. I think only a very small subset of users will use the styles for making sophisticated sketches.

A highly precise input device (the stylus, the mouse) is actually bad for the layman designer. There are just too many degrees of freedom to move, drop, stretch objects. That was the thought behind the design of the SlideMagic user interface (try it out here).

I did not design SlideMagic for use on smaller tablets and phones, but on a 2732 x 2048 screen, it might just be the perfect fit, a lucky coincidence.

I keep on looking for a good electronic solution for note taking, doodling, and scribbling. None of them are perfect. A new option has been added recently.

A good note taking solution needs to combine a number of things:

1. No paper to keep
2. Natural writing interface
3. Good filing and search
4. Minimal hardware to carry
5. A simple user interface

See my highly sophisticated analysis below.

The new option is a smartphone-based scanner. Scanner Pro is a brilliant app. It takes photos, and lets you easily crop the image. You can keep the image as a photograph or flatten it to bold, fax black and white. Then upload the scan to Dropbox or Google Drive where you can store and search things.

So the best note taking might be scribbling on a piece of paper, scanning it, and throwing away the paper.

PS: earlier review of the Inkling, Penultimate,Paper and styli (?) for iPad.

Handwritten notes are very important in presentation design. I use 2 kinds:

1. A very small note book with a beautiful leather cover to take meeting notes
2. The back pages of old print out for slide design (I take more pages out than I add, the pile is shrinking fast)

For writing I use my favorite pencil: the Lamy 2000 (review).

Let’s look at application 1 first: meeting notes

Although I love my luxury micro note book, there is a big problem with analogue note taking: finding stuff. Since you write sequentially, and often use poor handwriting, it is hard to access notes that are part of a specific project (I can have more than 10 things going on at the same time).

Digital note taking on an iPad can solve this: simply create a note book for every project.

The key problem is the iPad-hand interface. Steve Jobs always was against using a styles, he correctly reminded us that we have 10 of them already. That is true for navigation, but not for writing large pieces of text (fast). The biggest problem is seeing what you do. Big fingers are getting in the way of your eyes, leading to illegible scribbles. And after a while you get tired of holding your finger straight. So there is no escaping from a style.

An iPad stylus needs to have a fat tip with a soft surface, mirroring the texture of a human finger. The resulting line can still be highly thin though, getting drawn at the center of impact of the soft tip. To show this effect, see fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld sketch drawings live on stage during the LeWeb 2011 conference in Paris last year (skip to 19:50).