Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

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Gavster
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Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Gavster »

Last week at a big meeting with a bunch of American MBA type people I felt awfully out of touch when every other person was taking notes on a tablet with a stylus. I really enjoy using a pen/pencil to sketch stuff out in a pad, however I also try to keep my entire workflow as low-paper as possible. It looks like the final stage of my digital transition away from books and paper is to stop using paper and pen for notetaking.

Do any of you lot use a tablet and stylus for scribbling notes, diagrams, ideas etc?

The main uses will be for writing, plus sketching out graphic ideas, or making sense of a project workflow with a Miro-esque sketch. The main app I use for notes is Apple Notes and my work is usually in MS Word/Google Docs, plus organisation through Things, Notion and Slack.

This might well be a foregone conclusion as I'm an Apple fanboy, is the iPad a good tool for this kind of thing?
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by ZedLeg »

A friend of mines is an artist and uses a big ipad pro and apple pencil for sketching ideas. It works really well.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

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I use an iPad Mini for taking notes. Some of them I will then type in to some app or other to share - I really need to check the OCR function - but often I will just send them out as they are to people in a PDF which saves time. Its also great for marking up documents I have to review or even when discussing technical ideas/issues - being able to just draw a quick network diagram and share it with people straight away saves a lot of time. That thing you mention about just sketching out ideas including project workflows, I find it really hand for.

I've also found its good for sharing "drafts" of things with other people before spending the time doing it properly in Powerpoint/Visio etc. Just sketch it out, get feedback from people and then do the final one.

I'm not quite there yet, but there's lots of positives to it. I mainly use the GoodNotes app for it - I've got some templates loaded in there now for meeting notes; to-do lists; day calendars with a todo section etc.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Gavster »

Ascender wrote: Sun May 29, 2022 10:18 am I use an iPad Mini for taking notes. Some of them I will then type in to some app or other to share - I really need to check the OCR function - but often I will just send them out as they are to people in a PDF which saves time. Its also great for marking up documents I have to review or even when discussing technical ideas/issues - being able to just draw a quick network diagram and share it with people straight away saves a lot of time. That thing you mention about just sketching out ideas including project workflows, I find it really hand for.

I've also found its good for sharing "drafts" of things with other people before spending the time doing it properly in Powerpoint/Visio etc. Just sketch it out, get feedback from people and then do the final one.

I'm not quite there yet, but there's lots of positives to it. I mainly use the GoodNotes app for it - I've got some templates loaded in there now for meeting notes; to-do lists; day calendars with a todo section etc.
That sounds awesome Mike, very similar use cases. The document markup thing is very relevant as I'm constantly reading and reviewing long PDF reports/academic publications which need highlighting and notes. Currently doing this in Preview on desktop which can be a bit slow and clunky to make quick reviews/notes.

Damn I feel I need this now. I have piles of paper in my office with workflows/project plans which just go in the pile, it feels much more streamlined to have them digitally available to share. Just need to work out the cheapest possible iPad that I can do all these things with :lol: it sounds like the iPad Mini is fine though?
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Ascender »

I think its one of those things that will reward you with the more time you invest in it to get the app setup exactly as you want, some good templates etc. The Mini iPads are notebook sized which I really like for note taking but could be an expensive one to get if that's all you use it for. You might get more use out of an iPad/iPad Pro. The Pro has a much better quality screen and is still a comfortable size for note taking. If you could go and try holding a few that might be a good place to start. There's also differences between the two pencils...
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Gavster »

Thanks for the info, it sounds useful so decided to give one a go. There's a helluva a lot of work, planning and integration to do over next month so I walked to the apple store and tried a few. The Pros are lovely but for my use the only benefit was a slightly bigger green, which isn't worth it for the extra cost. Grabbed a basic 10.2in iPad with a stylus (with educational discount, the joys of having a university email address on one of my contracts) and will see how it goes :)
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Gavster »

And the 'experts' weren't very expert at answering questions about the utility of the apple pen in various Apple apps, I spoke to three and literally none of them could answer my questions about highlighting and annotating PDFs. I had to google it for them :lol:
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Jobbo »

I believe the character recognition on an iPad is very good - I know one of my charity co-trustees has used an iPad Pro (the original 12.9" version) with original Apple pencil for quite a few years for exactly this purpose.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Ascender »

The standard iPad is great value given its performance, likely supported life and all those apps.

Like @Jobbo says, the Apple API for character recognition is good so you can use the pencil in loads of apps to write texts, reply to mails etc and it will do its magic.

Let us know how you get on with it.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Jimmy Choo »

Jobbo wrote: Mon May 30, 2022 10:29 am I know one of my charity co-trustees
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

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Ascender wrote: Mon May 30, 2022 11:32 am The standard iPad is great value given its performance, likely supported life and all those apps.

Like @Jobbo says, the Apple API for character recognition is good so you can use the pencil in loads of apps to write texts, reply to mails etc and it will do its magic.

Let us know how you get on with it.
It is very good, I'm quite surprised at how well it has identified the words in my scribbles. I guess it probably learns too. In an added bonus it's forced me to write slightly neater than I would in my notepad :lol: because I was getting so many typos at first, however now I've started finding the balance. The best part of all this is that my hand-written notes are now searchable, which is bloody awesome.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Gavster »

Three days into this and I am spending more time editing my notes than writing them :lol:

Don't take that as a judgement against the validity of this way of doing things, it's because there's a lot of learning happening right now:

1. Learning to write more neatly to help Scribble recognise my words.
2. Learning the gestures and movements that allow quick editing of misspellings
3. Scribble is based on ML to identify movements and predict what you're going to write, so it's also probably learning about my writing style too.

I expect in a few weeks of practice the ipad it'll be getting my inputs with a very high level of accuracy :)
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by simon_g »

There are screen protectors (from a tenner or so up to £40+) that add a bit of texture so it feels more like a pen on paper. That frictionless skating over the screen I found really offputting.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

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simon_g wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 7:21 pm There are screen protectors (from a tenner or so up to £40+) that add a bit of texture so it feels more like a pen on paper. That frictionless skating over the screen I found really offputting.
That's a good idea, I guess they're probably matte finish too, which would be far preferable as low-glare for reading.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Ascender »

Gavster wrote: Sun Jun 05, 2022 9:13 am
simon_g wrote: Fri Jun 03, 2022 7:21 pm There are screen protectors (from a tenner or so up to £40+) that add a bit of texture so it feels more like a pen on paper. That frictionless skating over the screen I found really offputting.
That's a good idea, I guess they're probably matte finish too, which would be far preferable as low-glare for reading.
"Paperlike" is the one which seems to consistently get great reviews.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by simon_g »

Yeah, meant to be great but pricey. I have a matte Klearlook one that was around a tenner and works well.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Ascender »

simon_g wrote: Sun Jun 05, 2022 6:19 pm Yeah, meant to be great but pricey. I have a matte Klearlook one that was around a tenner and works well.
Thanks, for the tip, I'll try that one instead!
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Gavster »

Two months on and the handwriting recognition is still a bit iffy. The most frustrating errors are when it delays processing a word for a few seconds, thus inserting it in the sentence after I've written a couple more words. If that is combined with a typo, it can utterly destroy the meaning of a sentence. Typing on a keyboard or hand writing on paper is still more efficient - there's not enough time to check and make corrections to notes in a meeting, they need to be correct straight away.

I'm liking the full digitisation of my notes and multi-colour sketches have been very useful. Just hope the handwriting learns a bit more.
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by Gavster »

Got rid of the iPad. It got buried under a pile of paper, and I was surprised to find it a few months later "Oh, I forgot I had that".

It performed quite poorly at most tasks. Note-taking in meetings is far faster when typed on a keyboard, as opposed to an iPad. Sketching/brainstorming is more creative and freeing when it's on a piece of paper with a pen, away from any screens.

Doing lit reviews was the only task where it shone. Reading long or large volumes of PDF documents and quickly highlighting key parts with the Apple Pen is a great way to plough through a lot of research. However, I'm steering away from research projects, so hadn't needed to do that since last summer.

On the plus side, it sold on eBay for MORE than I paid for it new last year. A combination of buying on an educational discount (I'm a contractor at a uni, so get a staff email address), and Apple have now bumped up their prices. So I basically got a free iPad for nine months :lol:
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Re: Tablets with stylus for hand-written note taking

Post by tim »

I use my iPad Pro 11" and apple pencil with the FreeForm app, that seems to work pretty well.
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