Best business apps for the Digital pen - Computing Australia

Business Apps To Make The Most
Of Your Digital Pen

Best business apps for the Digital pen - Computing Australia

Business Apps To Make The Most Of Your Digital Pen

Business Apps To Make The Most Of Your Digital Pen

Move over the keyboard; the Digital Pen lets you do much more than the usual keyboard and standard computer, giving your productivity an extra boost. Of course, you will need business apps to make the maximum use of your Digital Pen. You can choose from the scores of apps out there based on your requirements. We have put together a list of the best business apps to help you get started.

What are the Benefits of Using Digital Pens?

Some of the benefits of using a digital pen are listed below:

  • Allows you to visualise your thoughts and ideas digitally
  • Provides an unlimited workspace to work with
  • Allows you to draw and write on multimedia content
  • Reduces the usage of paper
  • You can skip the trouble of ink refilling
  • Enables you to keep things organised
  • Allows you to back up, which prevents losing the notes in future
  • Next generation flipcharts and whiteboards
  • Easy to add notes and highlight texts than using keyboard and mouse
  • Digital drawings can help you to be more creative and communicative during remote meetings
  • Everything is stored digitally, allowing you to access it anywhere at any time.

Best Business Apps for Digital Pen

Now let’s see some of the popular business apps that can help you make use of your digital pen to improve your productivity.

1. Xodo PDF Reader and Editor

Xodo PDF Reader and Editor - The CAG

If you use PDFs often, then this is just the app for you. It lets you merge multiple PDFs, has a large selection of tools for highlighting and making written notes, and putting down your signature. It allows for easy navigation for PDFs with large no of pages and also has many grids and line templates.

2. Drawboard PDF

Drawboard PDF - The CAG

If you use PDFs often, then this is just the app for you. It lets you merge multiple PDFs, has a large selection of tools for highlighting and making written notes, and putting down your signature. It allows for easy navigation for PDFs with large no of pages and also has many grids and line templates.

3. Notability

Notability - Computing Australia

Notability can basically do it all, from simple note-taking to calculating sums, it even offers sketching tools and audio notes. New to the app is the ability to download open two notes simultaneously and move between the two, comparing notes for accuracy. You can import a mix of file formats, including PDFs, DOCs, PPTs, images and GIFs to create detailed note pages.

4. OneNote

OneNote - Computing Australia

OneNote is like a digital notebook and is a perfect app for those who like to keep things organized. You can draw, highlight texts, take notes on white, grid or ruled line backgrounds. The notes are saved and synced in the cloud so you can access your notes across devices.  

5. Bamboo Paper

Bamboo Paper - Computing Australia

Bamboo paper gives a very true paper feel while using the Pen. You can make notes and journals using the writing tools, draw and sketch with the custom color palettes and even add pictures to your page. It also allows for sharing your notes on other platforms.  

6. Sketchable

Sketchable - Computing Australia

Sketchable is another wonderful app for your drawing, sketching and painting needs. It’s a part journal, part canvas app which allows you to scribble a note, work on an existing image or artwork, or create a new artwork with its wide range of tools.

7. Scrble

Digital Pen apps | Computing Australia | 10 Business Apps

This is a notepad for writing and illustrations with just the basic tools. You can choose from the blackboard, whiteboard, lined paper, music sheets or maths sheet background and various paper options. The pen input response is quite impressive.

8. Collaboard

Digital Pen apps | Computing Australia | 10 Business Apps

Collaboard is aimed at people who work on team projects. Multiple users can contribute notes, videos and images in real-time to what is essentially a digital whiteboard. It is compatible with Skype and PDF.

9. Index Cards

Digital Pen apps | Computing Australia | 10 Business Apps

With Index Cards, you can take notes and arrange them in stacks. It’s an ideal app for taking notes, making drawings and storing information in brainstorming sessions, business meetings, storyboard writing, project meetings, etc. You can create an unlimited number of cards and type or draw on both sides of the card. The zoom function lets you make detailed drawings or put in a large amount of information on the card. You can also export stacks.

10. Plumbago

Best business apps for the Digital pen | Computing Australia

Plumbago is a note-taking app for the Surface aimed at capturing your ideas and organizing them into notebooks. Notes are displayed in a grid allowing for easy navigation between notebooks, and also within the notebooks. The radial menu is a movable dial, allowing you to select the color and pen and even an eraser. You can also choose from paper types and customize notebooks too.

11. AutoCAD

Best business apps for the Digital pen | Computing Australia

AutoCAD is one of the best apps in the market when it comes to vector designing. Moreover, AutoCAD 360 is the perfect touch-screen version suitable for working with your digital pen. It allows you to open and view your DWG files. You can effortlessly add measurements and dimensions to your drawings with the pinch and zoom ability and using your digital pen.

12. Journalist

Best business apps for the Digital pen | Computing Australia

Journalist is the ideal app for you if you love to journal or scribble down your ideas. It allows you to draw using different pens, pencils, unique brushes, colour palettes and effects. You can also create 3D drawings using the Isometric drawing tool. It lets you share many different content formats from other apps, including .png, .mp4, HTML, and .gif. Enjoy the freedom of a free-form canvas that includes several paper choices, rulers, and two-dimensional shapes to keep a digital journal.

13. Evernote

Best business apps for the Digital pen | Computing Australia

When it comes to note-taking apps, Evernote easily achieves one of the top spots. It syncs your notes and notebooks across any computer, phone, or tablet. Evernote lets you write and capture ideas as notebooks, searchable notes, checklists, and to-do lists. You can also highlight passages in saved articles and also record important notes during meetings

14. Nebo

Best business apps for the Digital pen | Computing Australia

Want an app that allows you to edit and format your notes quickly? Then Nebo will be your perfect choice. It lets you delete a note by just scratching it out and join two sentences together by swipe up.

15. Procreate

Procreate  - Computing Australia

Procreate is the king of iPad Pro natural media apps, and the addition of the Apple Pencil offers a wonderfully fluid analogue-like experience. The Apple Pencil’s fine tip, low latency, double-speed sampling rate and almost flawless palm rejection makes it the perfect tool for this wonderful creative app.

16. Inspire Pro

Inspire Pro - Computing Australia

One of the best iPad Pro apps for digital painting, Inspire Pro offers a surprisingly realistic art experience with an impressive feature set that can deliver truly professional results. With mediums such as oil, chalk, pastels and paint, the app offers multiple blending options (including blending paint with the dry brush), which are based on painting using real materials.

17. GoodNotes 6

GoodNotes - Computing Australia

Now on its fifth iteration, GoodNotes is one of the most popular iPad Pro apps for Apple Pencil for note taking. It turns your iPad into digital paper, offering a lot of freedom to create searchable handwritten notes. This is a note-taking app that goes well beyond a basic pad to scrawl on – it can handle everything from equations to mind maps, and its handwriting-to-text conversion is one of the best we’ve seen.

18. Adobe Fresco

Adobe Fresco  - Computing Australia

Adobe’s drawing app, Fresco, mimics other fine art drawing apps, bringing a natural painting and drawing experience to the iPad. It has a lot of strong features, including brilliant brush capability, an intuitive interface and super-smooth running, although when we tested it we found it does fall short in other areas and needs some depth to be added to make it truly great.

19. Concepts

Concepts - Computing Australia

Concepts is an award-winning, advanced sketching and design app. With infinite canvas and organic brushes, fluid and responsive vector drawing engine, and intuitive precision tools, it offers a wonderfully natural design experience.

20. LiquidText

LiquidText - Computing Australia

Finally, the last in our pick of the best note-taking apps for Apple Pencil is LiquidText, which is a handy tool for annotating while reading. The app allows the annotation of PDFs, Word and PowerPoint documents and even web pages. It’s a great option for active reading, allowing you to highlight sections of what you’re reading to come back to later or collapse parts of the document so you can cross-reference separate sections.

20. Paper

Paper - Computing Australia

At first glance Paper by WeTransfer (formerly Paper by FiftyThree) might look like a fairly simple drawing and diagramming tool, and it is on one level, but there are a few extra features here that can be difficult to discover but add a lot more possibilities

You can create headings and lists, add or remove spaces and line breaks, delete and emphasise text easily using your digital pen.

Need help with business apps for Digital Pen? Contact us today or email at helpdesk@computingaustralia.group.

Jargon Buster

PDF – Portable Document Format – a file format created to display documents consistently over various gadgets and platforms.
Digital pen – an input device for capturing handwritten notes or drawings and converts handwritten analog created with pen and paper data into digital format.
App – Application – is a computer program or software created to run on a mobile device like a phone, tablet or smartwatch.

Article originally published on 18/03/2020
Updated by Archana N S on 20/02/2024
Added new section:
What are the Benefits of Using Digital Pens?
Added apps:
AutoCAD
Journalist
Evernote
Nebo
Inspire Pro
Procreate
Notability
GoodNotes 5
Adobe Fresco
Concepts
LiquidText
Paper

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Vaikhari A

Vaikhari A is the Hosting and Technical SEO Coordinator at The Computing Australia Group. She thrives on challenging website launches and persists till she can get to the root of the problem. When not launching websites, she can be found devouring the latest in technical SEO, to keep the client websites functioning at their technical best.

Vaikhari A | Blog author | Computing Australia

Vaikhari A

Vaikhari A is the Hosting and Technical SEO Coordinator at The Computing Australia Group. She thrives on challenging website launches and persists till she can get to the root of the problem. When not launching websites, she can be found devouring the latest in technical SEO, to keep the client websites functioning at their technical best.