Best Draw App For Mac 2017

As of Apple's launch of the iPad Air 3 and the iPad mini 5, all-new model iPad devices support Apple Pencil. That's the 9.7-inch iPad, iPad Air, iPad Pro, and iPad mini. Whether you need to take handwritten notes, annotate documents, record audio, create sports playbooks, and more, the App Store has a number of fantastic apps for note-taking. Here isç the cream of the crop based on our extensive testing.

The best feature of this app is its nesting ability. It is far superior to any other apps on this list when its come to nesting. It is far superior to any other apps on this list when its come to nesting. The Notes app that comes stock on every iPhone and iPad almost feels as if it were made for the Apple Pencil. While some people love using it for sketching, I love using it just to write. The best Mac apps of 2017. No matter what you use your computer for, these Mac apps can help you boost your game. This year brought great utilities as well as specialized software for writers.

Starting out? Try The Notes app

The iPad's default Notes app is perfectly suited for use with Apple Pencil. It has text recognition search, inline scanning and annotation, and sketching or handwriting support. With Apple Pencil 2, you can assign the double-tap tool to either erase or the last tool used. It has more limited features than the best third-party notes app — you can't sync your notes anywhere but iCloud, and there's no easy way to link various notes together — but if you're just jotting down a quick note or sketching an idea, the Notes app is that perfect quick-hit app. Sort of like having a napkin with you at all times.

Notability is the best for general note-taking

Notability is a fan favorite of many note-taking aficionados, including me. It has an excellent interface full of tools for handwriting, drawing, annotating PDFs, making shapes, highlighting, moving objects around, adding audio, integrating photos and web clips, and more. If you want your note-taking experience to feel more real, you can choose from a number of different paper styles, including grids, which is very useful for vector line drawing. You can share your notebooks to just about every major service and print them, along with importing notebooks from Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, or a WebDAV service. Notability also offers iCloud sync support and a companion Mac app.

Mac

Because it's so feature-rich, it can seem a little intimidating to newcomers. Luckily, Notability has a really nice tutorial that guides you through its features when you first open it.

It also works flawlessly with the Apple Pencil — whether you're writing, sketching, or drawing shapes. It's an excellent, well-designed app if you want a little bit more power than what the default Notes app provides.

GoodNotes is for the power-using note-taker. It is packed to the brim with a robust list of pro features. I'd never heard of the app until developer Chris Liscio pointed it out, and I'm so happy he did.

For starters, GoodNotes offers a truly massive selection of paper types for its digital notebooks, including lined, graph, design, and music notation; there are even advanced options that let you upload custom templates. Better still, most templates are available in specific paper sizes (if you're working for print). GoodNotes also offers a ton of different cover styles and choices, all of which can be written upon and further designed.

Like the other apps in this roundup, GoodNotes supports writing and drawing with the Apple Pencil — along with a number of third-party stylus options — using two different digital writing tools: a digital fountain or ball pen in a preset or custom color spectrum.

GoodNotes also has built-in handwriting search recognition and text conversion (done via MyScript's engine, which also powers MyScript Nebo).

Note: As friend-of-iMore Jason Snell has pointed out, apps like GoodNotes do this largely by guessing your words. You might get a hit for 'app' after writing the word, but searching for 'ape' might bring you to the same page.

If you're looking for a more extensive option than Notability, GoodNotes is a feature-rich app well worth the download.

For Office users, OneNote is great

Microsoft's note app is more of a note storing receptacle than a full-featured note-taking app. That being said, it's got plenty of useful features for iPad owners with an Office 365 subscription. Even if you don't you can import and edit documents for free. You just need a Microsoft or Skype account. With OneNote, you can share links to your notebooks to the public, email a PDF of your notebook to others, and annotate documents with your Apple Pencil. In a single note, you can sketch an idea, add photos and audio, type notes, create calendars, and more. It's similar to Evernote but is designed to work seamlessly with Office 365.

PDF Expert is the king of PDF annotation and markup

Though you can quickly highlight, edit, and markup PDFs on your iPad using the built-in Markup extension, if you regularly need to annotate PDF files, you should consider PDF Expert instead. It's got a list of comprehensive markup tools to make things easier for you. You can open up PDFs from iCloud or pretty much any other online service with the PDF Expert app, fill out forms, and sign documents; you can also work with items with a digital pen, shape tool, underline, strike-thru, or highlighter option, as well as create 'stamps' for often-used wording. All of these changes, after saved, are not only fully editable in PDF Expert, but in apps like Adobe Acrobat and Preview — so you can move from Mac to PC and back again with your iPad.

PDF Expert also lets you edit the structure of PDFs themselves: You can rearrange pages, delete sections, extract parts of the PDF, and even add new blank pages to your documents. Once you're finished with a PDF document, you can even zip it (or multiple documents) with PDF Expert's built-in compressor, and password-protect crucial documents.

Should you want to further tinker with your PDFs, Expert offers a Pro upgrade in-app that allows you to physically edit the text, images, and links inside a PDF, as well as redact information.

If you need handwriting recognition, get MyScript Nebo

Best Draw App For Mac 2017

Forget mere note-taking: If you want your scribbles converted to text, you're going to need an app that supports handwriting conversion. We've come a long way from the Newton and egg freckles, but the apps available for such things are still few and far between. Apps like Notes and GoodNotes scan your text for search purposes, but don't offer outright handwriting recognition. In contrast, there are apps like MyScript Nebo, which offers full handwriting-to-text conversion.

MyScript has been a big name in handwriting recognition for years (including a handwriting recognition keyboard), but the Nebo app is the company's first attempt at an app designed for Apple Pencil and iPad Pro, and it's excellent. It's simple enough to use and offers a silky-smooth digital pen tool in multiple colors. In addition, users can add photographic and video content, diagrams, and equations alongside handwriting or digital text.

Nebo's notebooks can be converted a paragraph at a time or as a full notebook; those conversions are entirely non-destructive, too, so you can preserve the handwriting if the type conversion isn't perfect. You can also export notebooks as text, HTML, PDF, or Word documents. Sync is available through MyScript's proprietary service, as well as iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox.

Here are some other great note-taking apps that don't necessarily fit this list, but are still worth mentioning in their own right.

Evernote, Free with in-app subscription: Like Microsoft's OneNote, Evernote is an incredible import repository for organizing a ton of data, notes, documents, and sketches. But to take full advantage of its sync capabilities, PDF annotation, and more, you need a monthly subscription. Evernote is great if you need all the features a subscription provides, but not quite worth jumping in for the free version.
LiquidText, Free with in-app purchases: LiquidText is a brilliant concept for organizing and annotating PDFs but it's a little too specialized to be considered equal to PDF Expert.
Noteshelf, $13.99: This app combines many great features from Notability and GoodNotes, including custom page templates and audio recordings, but the writing tool isn't quite as good.
Notes Plus, $9.99: Notes Plus is a strong entry in the handwriting recognition category with support for Apple Pencil — but it's a little clunkier in the looks department, with iffy palm rejection.
Whink, $4.99: Whink is a great entry-level handwriting app, and it's still quite nice, offering nice pen tools, audio and photo integration, and basic document annotation. But the stock Notes app is a better overall recommendation for most users.

Your favorites?

These note-taking apps are the perfect fit for iPad and Apple Pencil users. They're not the only ones in the App Store, though. Do you have a favorite you'd like to see on this list? Put them in the comments!

Updated April 2019: Updated for Apple Pencil 2 and support for iPad Air 3 and iPad mini 5.

Serenity Caldwell contributed to an earlier version of this guide.

Drawing on iPad: The ultimate guide

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Flowcharts and Diagrams Made Easy

Business professionals, educators, and students often need to make visuals to go along with other materials they present. An organizational chart may help an executive explain to investors the company's structure. An educator might need a flowchart to explain a complex process to students. A medical student might create an annotated figure of the human body for a peer-reviewed paper. Few people who need to create these visuals just happen to also be experts in online drawing and design. These easy-to-use productivity apps are precisely what such users need.

Diagramming apps help people who have no artistic talent produce professional-looking organizational charts, floor plans, evacuation maps, Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and other visuals. They're typically pretty easy to learn to use, especially if you're familiar with other office software.

Diagramming software was invented after vector software failed to help people who were not artistically inclined. Vector software gives you tools for drawing lines, making boxes and circles, and adding text. If you're an artist or a designer, you can use those virtual pen-and-paper products to make whatever you need. If you're not an artist, however, vector software is completely frustrating to use. You might as well be thrown back into the seventh grade with nothing more than construction paper and a protractor to make visuals for a multimillion-dollar company.

Templates.All good diagramming software comes with templates. Templates are sample versions of the visuals you are likely going to create. Unlike old-school vector software, modern diagramming apps are built with the kinds of diagrams people are likely to make in mind. They therefore provide templates for all the common purposes for diagrams. That's why I mentioned org charts, flowcharts, and floor plans early in this article. Those are some of the most common diagram types people create, and I haven't found a diagramming app that doesn't offer several templates in all those categories.

Objects. Templates start you out with a layout for your visual. Objects are the pieces of content on the template. Many templates come with objects already in place, but there are more objects, usually in a pane to the left, that you can add to your masterpiece. Diagramming software also lets you add custom objects when you upload images. If your company or educational program has specific visuals that need to be incorporated into a diagram, you don't have to draw them by hand to add them. You can instead simply upload image files.

Collaboration. Maybe with the right tools, you can make the perfect visuals. Or maybe you need some help from a coworker who fills in details, or from an art director who finesses your work into something even more appealing. Diagramming apps that support collaboration allow more than one person to edit a graphic simultaneously. In the best apps, the collaboration is live and in real time, much the way Google Docs and other apps in the G Suite support it. Being able to collaborate effortlessly also means that when you pass a diagram on to a manager or boss for approval, that person can make a few lights edits firsthand rather than telling you what the changes should be. That saves everyone a lot of time and reduces frustration.

How Much Does it Cost?

The cheapest diagramming apps are free to use, and the most expensive ones cost around $300 for a desktop version of the software. Subscription fees are much more common than straight purchases, however, with the best apps charging between $100 and $200 per year.

My favorite apps are those that offer a free level of service so that you can try them out without a time limitation. They usually add more features and services if you upgrade to a paid tier of service (in other words, they're freemium apps). Be careful with free services, though. Sometimes when you create diagrams with them, your files are publicly viewable. You wouldn't want to create a company networking diagram, for example, that might contain sensitive information that anyone could find.

Top Software for Flowcharts and Diagrams

After I tested and compared several of the most popular apps for creating diagrams, two stood out for their exemplary ease of use, feature set, template and object library, and value. They are Lucidchart and SmartDraw. These two earn PCMag's Editors' Choice.

My top choice among these two winners is Lucidchart. Lucidchart is an online diagramming app with excellent support for collaboration, and it's easy to pick up and use. Because it's online, there's no need to worry about whether all the collaborators are running macOS or Windows. Lucidchart simply runs in the browser.

SmartDraw is the runner-up, and I like the web app version SmartDraw Cloud for the same reason I like Lucidchart. Why worry about platform compatibility when everyone can simply work on the web? SmartDraw's template library is even bigger than Lucidchart's, but the app costs a bit more and doesn't have the same excellent real-time co-authoring features.

The Best Free Software for Flowcharts and Diagrams

When it comes to free diagramming apps, Draw.io is my go-to. Draw.io works very well if you're in the position of needing to make a visual or two every so often, and paying $100 a year for the privilege seems bonkers.

Best Apps For Mac

Draw.io lets you save your files to cloud storage services Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive. You can also save files you create with it to your computer. Even though it's a web app, there's an offline option and Chrome users can access it by installing the Draw.io Desktop Chrome app.

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If you're feeling suspicious about why Draw.io is entirely free, here's the deal. The company makes one version of the product that it sells for a fee: Draw.io for Confluence Server. That version of Draw.io is a plug-in for Confluence Server, and it lives entirely behind the firewall. It lets teams create diagrams within those spaces to have visual aids and representations of the work done there. If you get hooked on the free version of Draw.io and you're in the market for a tool that specifically works with Confluence Server, maybe you'll bite and pay for the service.

Explore Your Templates!

One of my favorite things about diagramming apps is exploring the templates. You might just find a diagram you didn't even know you needed, such as a business decision-making diagram for responding to emergencies. Need to post a First Aid chart in your office break room? Does your kid's soccer team have a phone tree? Browse the templates in a diagramming app, and you're sure to uncover something unexpected and hopefully useful, which will surely help you appreciate the value of having it in the first place. For more tips on how to get important documents made in hurry, you can read How to Make Key Emergency Documents in Under an Hour.