Apple Pencil for Non-Artists

The Apple Pencil is a big reason why some people pick the iPad over a MacBook or any other computer. There is a lot you can do with the Apple Pencil. But if you're not an artist like myself, is the Apple Pencil even, for you? Well, I'm here to show you everything you can do with an Apple Pencil as a non-artist. This video is sponsored by Notability. Now, this video may sound familiar to long time viewers of the channel, and that's because I made a video on this very subject nine years ago. A little peek behind the curtain, my YouTube channel is turning 10 years old this November, and I thoug ht it might be interesting to go back to some of my older videos and revisit that subject matter and see how it's evolved over time. When I made a video about this subject almost a decade ago, there was only one Apple Pencil, and since then we've had the Apple Pencil II, the Apple Pencil Pro, and the USB-C Apple Pencil. Luckily, Apple has cleaned up the Apple Pencil line and is just now the Apple Pencil Pro and the USB- C Apple Pencil. Now there are a bunch of features baked into iPad OS that can take advantage of the Apple Pencil if you 're not an artist like me. I can't draw. I cannot somebody say draw me. I I couldn't do it. SmartScript is one of the newer features for the Apple Pencil. If you're like me, you've probably tried to make handwritten notes a thing every single year like clo ckwork. And every single year you realize your handwriting is terrible and not legible whatsoever, you give up on it and then move back to type notes. But smart script learns your handwriting. It takes your handwritten text and cleans it up and not in some way of it using an AI to generate new text or or it's not replacing it with a font or even replacing what you're writing. It's just cleaning up what you wrote. It makes the stuff that you wrote a little more legible, it straightens it out, and makes it look a little more consistent overall. It'll also even fix any spelling mistakes as well, all while keeping the text handwritten and in your style. You can even select text, copy or cut it, and then paste it somewhere else. For the entire life of the Apple Pencil, I've tried to be a handwritten notes guy. Every year, like I said, I think this is gonna be the year. I'm gonna just start taking handwritten notes. I'm gonna handwrite a journal every single day and it's not legible. With smart script, that fixes that. Now it does take a very very small amount of time in order to kick in. See the way it works is it learns your handwriting. So if you write like a paragraph or two it'll learn from there and it'll start to kick in and you'll st art to see it work on its own. So if you don't see it right away don't worry it you just need to write a little bit. Smart script treats your handwriting like it's written text not, like a font or anything like that. It doesn't convert anything, it keeps it all handwritten, and I really appreciate that. Kind of along the same lines, but also not so really, is math notes. This allows you to write out equations in your handwriting and it will then auto-solve them for you. Basically, a calculator, but you can handwrite out things. I don't personally use this a lot, but if you're somebody that's going around and taking measurements , I can see this big for like construction sites and stuff like that. I'm writing down a bunch of measurements. I need to like equal some stuff out. I need to do some math. Or even if like, hey, we're talking about a project, I can do some back of the napkin math to give som ebody a quote or something like that. This is what MathNotes is great at, is you can just write out what a problem is, you hit the equal sign , and it'll solve it for you. The next one is dedicated to all those people that can't draw a rectangle to save their life. Myself included. With the Apple Pencil and apps like Notes and Freeforms and others that use the standard Apple Pencil tools, you can use shape recognition. For example, you're moving things around in a room. You want to re-dese a room, you want to redesign it, you can sketch it out and diagram the way you want to look at it. You draw a rectangle first for that room, but hey, you're like me and you can't draw a rectangle to s ave your life. What you can do is you can start to draw it, and once you complete that rectangle, you hold that Apple pencil, don't release it like you normally would. You hold it for just a split second, and iPad OS will recognize what shape you're trying to draw and fi x all the sides for you. So this way it's a proper rectangle with 90-degree angles and not some obtuse monstrosity. I use this all the time. When I was kind of redesigning this room in here over Christmas break, I sketched all of this stuff out and, I kind of came up with a game plan. And I use this feature particularly because I can't draw. This video is sponsored by Notability. Notability is an excellent note-taking and productivity app. I'm sure a lot of you know Notability as a place to take handwritten notes, and it's excellent at that . You can turn handwritten notes into searchable databases, plus any PDF document can also be searchable as well. I've been using it to mark up PDF documents like my scripts and contracts. And of course I can annotate and sign those contracts right here in the app. I also set up my old journaling template in here. My template may need some updates, but it works perfectly in notability. Notability isn't just for handwritten text. It also has a built-in audio recording feature that uses AI to turn spoken words into a transcript. I used this the other day just to riff some ideas. It did a great job at handling the transcription. I just leaned back and said what was ever on my mind. After I was done with it, it gave me a summary of what the transcript was about as well. Notability has other AI features, like the ability to summarize any slide deck or PDF document, an AI powered chat so you can ask it questions about your notes or text. That can be super handy if you have a lot of notes and you have a hard time finding something specific . Plus notability has ventured into collaboration, so you can work with your team in real time. And of course your notes sync across all of your devices the iPhone the iPad the Mac and even the web notability has individual pricing if you're a solo person like myself but they just rolled out subscri ptions for business teams as well go check out notability today I'll put some links in the description below. I've really been enjoying it as a place to work with my Apple Pencil. My thanks to Notability for sponsoring this video. Okay so I talked about SmartScript and how it cleans up your handwritten text, but what if you want to go the other way? What if you have an app that only does tight text? But hey, I've got this apple pencil here. I I want to still use this t for my writing. So you can use what's called scribble. Scribble lets you use the apple Pencil in areas that only select type text as input. So this will allow you to write something out and will then convert it to type text into that app. If you're somebody that's using like the iPad in tablet mode a lot, like you don't have a keyboard con nected to it, and you have that Apple Pencil in hand. You just want to fill something out really quick, send a message. You can do this with the Apple Pencil. And then the nice thing is after you fill it out, you can use the Apple Pencil to interact with the U I. So you never have to actually set the pencil down. One of my favorite features to use with the Apple Pencil and the iPad goes back to the original iPad Pro , and this is the ability to open up a notes document right from the lock screen. You see, if you take the Apple Pencil and just tap your iPad, even when it's locked, it will open up a new note in the notes app. You can then handwrite out a note, write some measurements, draw a diagram, whatever you would need to do in that notes app, you have full access to that note there. Now this gives the anyone the ability to do this. So I don't have to authenticate with the iPad to do this. The idea is it can just quickly launch this. So you don't get access to all of your notes in this mode. You do need to unlock your iPad for that, but you get access to this one note. If you go into settings, apps, notes, lock screen, and control center, you can change what happens when you tap the lock screen with the Apple Pencil. You can have it always open a new note or open a previous note. The Apple Notes app gets a lot of benefits for being the system note-taking app. There's things it can do that I really wish third-party apps could do, one of those being QuickNote. This has been built into iPad OS before it was even called iPad OS. With your Apple Pencil, you can swipe in from the bottom left corner and you will get a popover window . This directly hooks into the notes app. You can handwrite, type, draw insert images add urls whatever you want in here this will act as a full fledged notes document if you use a keyboard like the magic keyboard with your iPad you can hit the ke yboard shortcut globe q to enable this anywhere in the system. And if you use Apple notes, this is a must-use feature. It's it's a superpower really. It makes it really easy just to take a note. And if you have say like a Safari page open, it'll actually suggest adding that URL to that Safari page , and that's kind of a nice feature. In the actual notes app, these quick notes go into a folder called quick notes. I know, confusing, right? Um it's really straightforward. And then you can move those documents out of the Quick Notes folder, but if you move them out of the Qu ickNotes folder, you won't be able to access them in that little quick note window anymore. I really wish Apple would open up these last two features, two third-party note-taking apps. That would be really nice, but I also see why they're like kind of locked into the system. They're very specific utilities. Like with Quick Note, if you swipe in from the bottom left corner, you will now get the ability to tak e a screenshot. You can then select the built-in markup tools to draw or write on your screenshot. I use this almost every single day when I'm sending screenshots off to people to highlight something speci fic, whether it's text or call something out, whatever. I use this all the time. It's such a handy utility to have. The markup tools are also built into the preview app and well, a lot of other apps too. Just look for this pen icon. If you need to sign contracts, fill things out, highlight stuff for changes, whatever, the tools to do that are right here built into iPad OS. Again, this is a tool set I use almost every single day. Now this tool set is technically called pencil kit and, it's going to be built into a lot of system app s and even some third-party apps as well. There's built-in tools from pin to highlighter to calligraphy to a ruler, but there's also really nice details as well, like the color palette has the option of being able to save custom colors to it. So if you have brand colors that you work with, you can save them right to the color palette so you can quickly access them. There's built-in shape tools, the ability to insert your signature, and even add text boxes. So if you get PDF documents that aren't able to add text to them, you can do them right from the system . Don't sleep on these tools. Even if you just take five minutes to play around with them just so they're in the back of your head. If you ever need something like this, it's just right here. It's really nice and easy to go for. The journal app recently came to the iPad. Now I'm not a big journal app user. In fact, I do my daily note in notability, the sponsor of this video that I just talked about, but I w anted to call out the journal app because it has really great Apple Pencil support. This includes the ability to handwrite entries and even draw on them. If you're somebody that prefers handwriting or even daily drawings, the journal app is a great place to do it. Plus it's free. So that's kind of great. I want to hear from you all how do you use your Apple Pencil, especially if you're like me and you can 't draw, like you got an Apple Pencil and you're like, I can't draw. What what should I use this thing for? Let me know in the comments below. My thanks to Notability for sponsoring this video. If you like the video, hit the thumbs up button, subscribe if you haven't already, and have a great da y.