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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have experience with the artistic capabilities of the Pro, e.g the Pencil? Maybe I've been paying less attention to Apple news/chatter over the years (and perhaps excitement over the iPad, overall, is much less than when it first came out)...but I haven't come across many articles/blog posts in the wild about the real impact/benefit of Pencil to digital artists. It sounds very promising but I'm not willing to pay that much for an accessory if it's just a novelty.

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There's tons of videos on YouTube by a lot of amazing artists using the iPad Pro + Pencil. My girlfriend wasn't sure whether to get one or a Cintiq; comparison reviews [1] convinced her to go for the iPad and she loves it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMA25CqKcn8

It is the best option out there now.

Some downside for those experienced and very comfortable using a Wacom + carefully configured Photoshop brushes, same with 3D artists using zBrush.

Astropad (app) does a fairly good job letting the iPad Pro work as a tablet for OS X devices. I get a little more lag that appears on YouTube videos of it.

It's so, so, so, very awesome. I no longer carry a paper notebook for taking notes.

But, you could figure out yourself if you like it in approximately 30 seconds at an apple store; try it out in the notes app and a few other drawing apps. You'll know immediately if it's right for you.

That's why I was waiting for the smaller iPad Pro: note taking! I'm glad you say it works well -- I did try the pencil in the apple store and it seemed pretty good.

But do you have an app that takes notes and converts your handwriting to text? I haven't found reviews of apps that seem to do that well. That's the real point of taking them digitally instead of on paper.

There's nothing out there that's any good for me right now. I'm giving it a year. I would really like a modern app that lets me read and markup web pages, pdfs and make notes and drawings all seamlessly, and makes it searchable, etc.

Onenote and Evernote are way, way worse than a paper notebook for my needs, but I can taste the chance that a working digital notebook offers. It's so close!

I found GoodNotes to be absolutely perfect for my needs of a note-taking app. With the Pencil, it has completely replaced paper for me. It also does conversion from handwriting to text, although I can't say I use that feature much. It does seem to work quite well for normal writing, but for lots of greek letters and math it fails (expectedly).

Okay, I gave GoodNotes a shot yesterday. Lots to like is my first reaction; thanks for the tip!

It has that tiny bit of latency that all ios pencil apps seem to have; only Apple Notes feels 'perfect' to me right now. And, the paper texture / materials in Notes are better; the Notes pencil tool is just about perfect in my opinion.

On the plus side, I liked having all the different graph papers, the notebook features seem to work well, and marking up a pdf was fine.

I'll see if I reach for it next time I'm taking notes, but right now it's neck and neck with Apple Notes for me.

Have you looked at the Surface? Penny Arcade has had pretty good things to say about it but there have been plenty of other reviews as well.

http://www.parkablogs.com/picture/review-microsoft-surface-p...

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...

http://www.windowscentral.com/check-out-artists-perspective-...

It's good for a stylus, but it's still drawing on glowing glass with a piece of plastic.

Yes, but for the first time, it's very tolerable (to me, personally). The friction actually does feel close to pen and paper

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