GoodNotes Tips & Tricks — 5 Smart Ways How To Use Drag & Drop On The iPad
Apple has done an incredible — even though not flawless — job with iOS 11 and the drag & drop feature. The whole operating system feels more integrated because your apps are not strangers anymore. We can see an increasing level of compatibility. Finally, you can use and apply all the gestures with your fingers that Steve Jobs would have loved.
Working on an iPad is much more intuitive nowadays. In some of our recent articles, we have covered great drag & drop interactions that make it possible to add a screenshot of any PDF page as a new notebook in GoodNotes, or even to drag handwritten notes to other apps where they will appear as typed text. So far, most of the tips & tricks on how to use drag & drop in iOS 11 have been pretty much about sending files and documents back and forth between apps. Yet, with drag and drop, you can do a lot more to increase your paperless productivity. Check out these 5 creative workflows:
1. Drag your handwritten meeting notes into your task manager to add a to-do
Take this example: You just finished a meeting where you have discussed the first results of your new content marketing strategy and you have taken a bunch of notes on your iPad using GoodNotes. The notes include some tasks that you want to work on in the next days. To remember them, you want to add them to your task-manager Sorted. With iOS 11, this is as easy as it gets. Open your meeting notes and bring in your to-do app in split view. Select the handwritten to-dos and draw a circle around them using the lasso tool. Now you can drag the selection over to the other app and — POP — they will show up as a new task in your inbox. Notice how even bullet lists and emojis convert!
2. Share annotated photos and sketches via email
Picture this: You moved into your new flat and sit in your living room staring at the blank wall in front of you. Suddenly, it hits you. How cool would it be if you had your own fireplace right at that spot? Of course, you want to tell your wife, or roommate, or mom or anyone about that but you really want to convince them. So what do you do? You pick up your iPad and take a photo of the wall. Fortunately, you already had a notebook in GoodNotes to collect interior design inspiration. Then, you can visualize your new idea with a few quick strokes using your stylus. Again, you can pick up the photo AND the annotations you made and drop it into the mail draft that you bring in using slide over. Almost magically, the background is being removed but the annotations stay in place. Sure, within a few weeks you will have that fireplace making your living room a bit more cozy for wintertime.
3. Prepare graphics for your Keynote and PowerPoint presentations
Didn‘t we all face that problem before? You‘re working on that important presentation for school or the next meeting but you just can‘t get the last graph right. Somehow, the alignment is always off. It can’t be too hard right? Every four year old could draw that… So why don‘t you do it as well? Use GoodNotes, or any other iPad notes or sketching app to draw that graph. Then, drag it over to the presentation where it appears as an image. Some things are still a lot easier using your hands because they are “the most natural and direct pointing device” as Steve Jobs would have said.
4. Drag a phone number from your notes to contacts and convert it to text
RING RING “Who‘s there?… Yes… Yes… Hold on, let me grab a piece of paper real quick, I‘m writing it down.“
Does that sound familiar to you? Handwriting is still king when it is important to focus on other things like paying attention to your dialog partner who is dictating you a very important phone number. In iOS 11 on your iPad, you can drag and drop the phone number over to your contacts. Thanks to GoodNotes‘ powerful handwriting to text engine, it will appear as typed text. Notice how it is being recognized, even though the note is not written completely straight.
5. Open links from your notes in the right app
Okay, this use case might be a bit far-fetched but we wanted to share it anyway. It shows what kind of things are possible with drag and drop on your iPad and provides a peek into the future of handwriting.
Imagine you visited a conference, say the recent Release Notes Conference in Chicago. You listen to the speakers and some of them were so inspiring that you want to follow them on Twitter afterward. Like every speaker nowadays, they have included their Twitter handles in their slide-deck. Since you want to keep all the notes of the conference in a single notebook for easy reviewing, you decide to also write down the URLs to the speakers‘ Twitter profiles. Using the app Opener, you can drag the handwritten links into it and open them in the suggested app right away, without going through Safari or another browser.
Our App GoodNotes 4 is the perfect app for drag and drop. It has never been easier to collect all your formerly paper-based documents and information by dragging them into your document library where you can annotate and manage them. Thanks to the app‘s powerful OCR technology, you can drag your handwritten notes to other apps where they will automatically convert to typed text or an image, depending on what the receiving app is accepting. This allows building powerful and amazing workflows around something as simple as handwritten notes.
GoodNotes is available on the App Store for iPad and iPhone.
