**Staying Organized with Apple Pencil and iPad**

As an individual who values organization and productivity, staying on top of tasks and ideas can be a daunting task. However, with the right tools and apps, it's possible to stay focused and efficient. In this article, we'll explore three powerful apps that will help you maximize your iPad experience using Apple Pencil.

**Craft: A Versatile Note-taking App**

One app that has gained significant attention in recent times is Craft. This app allows users to create a unique note-taking system that's tailored to their specific needs. With Craft, you can organize your thoughts and ideas into blocks, which can be easily dragged and dropped around the screen. The app also features a sleek design that makes it visually appealing, making it easy to navigate and use.

One of the standout features of Craft is its ability to integrate with other apps. Users can create instances of their notes and open them in split-screen mode, allowing for seamless collaboration and reference between different projects. Additionally, Craft supports widgets, which enable users to customize the layout of their workspace and access frequently used tools quickly.

**Journal: A Productivity App with a Focus on Sanity**

Another app that's gaining popularity is Journal. This app takes a different approach to note-taking, focusing on keeping your mind clear and organized rather than just jotting down notes. Users can create spaces for different projects or topics, and add media such as websites, videos, podcasts, emails, images, and more. The app also features a unique space organization system that makes it easy to access and manage your content.

Journal's interface is clean and minimalistic, with a focus on simplicity and ease of use. Users can create new spaces with ease, adding links, notes, and media as needed. The app also integrates well with Apple services, making it easy to access and share your content. One of the standout features of Journal is its ability to pause and resume work seamlessly, allowing users to take breaks without losing their progress.

**A Comparison of Craft and Journal**

While both Craft and Journal offer unique strengths, they cater to different user needs. Craft is ideal for those who value flexibility and customization in their note-taking system, with a focus on organization and productivity. Journal, on the other hand, takes a more holistic approach, focusing on maintaining mental clarity and sanity.

In terms of design, both apps have distinct personalities. Craft's sleek interface makes it feel like a cutting-edge tool, while Journal's minimalistic design gives it a clean and simple aesthetic. Ultimately, the choice between these two apps depends on your personal preferences and note-taking needs.

**Other Apple Pencil Apps**

There are many other Apple Pencil-enabled apps available, each with their own unique features and benefits. Some popular alternatives to Craft and Journal include Note 16, GoodNotes, and Notability. These apps offer a range of tools and features that cater to different user needs, from simple note-taking to advanced organization systems.

**Conclusion**

When it comes to staying organized with Apple Pencil and iPad, there are many powerful apps available. Whether you're looking for flexibility and customization or a more holistic approach to productivity, there's an app out there for you. By exploring these options and finding the one that works best for your needs, you can maximize your iPad experience and stay on top of your tasks and ideas.

**Additional Resources**

For those who want to learn more about Apple Pencil apps, be sure to check out our after-party podcast series. Each week, we dive deeper into the latest and greatest apps, exploring their features, benefits, and user experiences. You can also follow us on social media at dailytechspell, where we share behind-the-scenes insights, tips, and tricks for getting the most out of your Apple Pencil apps.

**Links to Additional Resources**

* Daily Tech Spell Instagram: [insert link]

* Daily Tech Spell Twitter: [insert link]

* After Party Podcast Series: [insert link]

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey it's chris these are a few of my recent productivity focused ipad app discoveries and i'm really excited to see which one you think is going to be the best for you the first app that we're checking out today is called muse and it markets itself as a spatial canvas for your research notes your reading your sketching your screenshots and your bookmarks because get this to the muse team deep thinking doesn't happen in front of a computer it happens on your ipad i'm just going to read you a little quote here listen to what the muse team has to say about the ipad being a special place okay desktops are for the most complex sophisticated tasks phones are for when you're on the go for quick capture for saving etc tablets are an intermediate step for reading for annotating for forming ideas for rearranging ideas to the muse team your ipad is an intermediary step between doing really complicated sophisticated things on your desktop and between capturing and saving things from your phone it's this in-between place where you can interact with things in a very different way than on any other device including with the apple pencil that's a huge part of the muse experience in my mind muse is the closest thing to a digital whiteboard as you can actually get a place where you can just throw all kinds of things move them around and actually come in and annotate things just like you would on a real digital whiteboard except it has some digital superpowers it's like a whiteboard on steroids so you can tap to turn on or off the tools there's a place where you can add things like a board a photo a file some text or paste something but what muse does is it gives you some cards and you can pinch into and zoom back out of each of these cards here's an empty board i can say hi and then i can get out of that board here's a text card so i can come in here and actually do some more typing and then i can get back out of that it's very ipad native what i mean is it's made for pinching and zooming in gestures and touch and the apple pencil and then all of these cards can be stacked and arranged and then you can use your apple pencil to come in and mark all of those things up it's pretty amazing now look what i did i came in here and i pasted this youtube video from andy mineo man i love how you can mark this up it's awesome and i can tap on that and it will take me to that youtube video which is great let me drop in a photo of some coffee that i had for breakfast today i can come in here and write on it i can zoom back out i think you're starting to see how this is very different than other ipad apps i do wish however that i had taken the time to install a paper like on this ipad because it feels weird without it i've gotten so used to it that it's just not as good of an experience without my paper like you forget after using it for a while how paper-like it actually is and how unpaper-like the ipad is all by itself without that screen cover but when you really need to get into an idea or a topic and do some planning and things need to be messy then this is a place that will actually let you connect things in a very fluid way without being too rigid and that's why it's so awesome one thing you'll notice is that the pencil kit tools are very minimal and they only show up when you need them it's just a very fluid and natural experience and honestly it's just unlike anything else that i've ever tried it's so cool too to be able to mix different kinds of elements because you know i know some people are really rigid and structured and they like a grid layout and everything to be organized just so i think this kind of an option is just gonna set a lot of people free when it comes to unlocking your ideas and organizing and thinking in a different way now here's something that's kind of funny the muse people said no we're going to make an ipad app first and the iphone app is just going to be a companion to the ipad app so they fully expect you to capture things on your phone but not do any work there the work actually comes within the ipad app itself and that's a super unique approach i feel like a lot of people start with the iphone or the mac and then kind of replicate that experience the best they can on other devices but here they're like no really the ipad is the best for this type of usage and the iphone actually plays a useful unnecessary but supporting role the next app that we're talking about is called craft it's a note-taking app which do we really need another note-taking app we have apple notes we have good notes notability bear notion the list goes on and on and on but craft is actually crafted for the ipad first and that makes a huge huge difference it does work on the mac it does work on the iphone but it really takes advantage of touch and drag and drop and it's visual first and it just feels native to the ipad and if you're an ipad user that's a big big deal now right off the bat you're going to see that this is a block based notes app so that lets you do some really unique things notion of course is also block based probably the thing that popularized block based note taking and kraft kind of picks that idea up and runs with it it's gonna let you add a block from photos or your camera from stock photos like unsplash you can add a sketch a scan some files you can insert code a formula plain text and there are some real benefits to working with blocks i mean it's really easy to drag something to a different place and reorder it for instance of course you can bulk edit things you know if you want to group stuff together that's really handy here but i kind of like that it doesn't go nuts with the blocks notion is almost too in-depth there's so many block options that can be overwhelming for people right and i think most people probably end up not even fully exploring everything that notion can do this does a lot but it keeps it simpler so by default and craft you get a page but anything within that page can also be turned into its own page so you kind of end up with page section it's like pages within pages within pages if you want something else that's cool is that you can change how each page looks so you can kind of give it its own feel and personality so i can click these dots i can say page style i can give it a cover image so i'm just going to come in here and pick a random photo for my header i can choose to show the title or not or the author i can give the block spacing a dynamic or classic look if i like the margins on the side i can keep those at regular or i can say give me a wide view but it's got some fun tricks i can come in and hit slash and choose from all kinds of different types of blocks like a list block maybe a to-do block with the slash that's how you can change colors or indent or align things i can even do things like insert the date which is really handy now let's see what happens when i paste a url look at that i got a card here which takes me to a nice little preview without jumping into safari or the browser now this url preview is a good example of a card and you can style these cards a little bit differently you can do small regular or large for your cards and by the time that you end up with a several different cards this really makes for a great way to visually see and organize things right isn't this so much better than just seeing an actual text link in yellow like you see in apple notes in fact any kind of media that you put in here comes in as a card so here's an andy mineo music video and i'm just gonna give it a small card here what happens when i click on it it opens up preview i can see it right here all right here's what it looks like when i paste in a tweet again it comes in as a card this one i'm gonna style as a bigger version and you know what let's do this one as a bigger one too and then once you get a bunch of these cards in you can come in and drag those around and reorder them which is great now look here's something that's cool here's kind of an outline that i made for a video but if i come in here and select a bunch of blocks and i'm like hey those are related they should be their own page i can easily group those together and then look it's created a page within a page here then i can come in and give that group a title and it's just a super cool way to organize your thoughts and then of course i can pick that up and drag that around now you can come in here and create a sketch block which will then let you use the apple pencil so your apple pencil is supported but it's just the very basic default pencil kit apple pencil experience i love that i can take a block and drag it over to the side and do a side by side view of my notes within craft you can have multiple instances open the split screen support is incredibly good and then of course i can come in and drag and drop stuff between the note that i just put over in the side window and that works for your blocks as well if you need to transfer them something else that's very cool is that it has some widget support so you can get a small medium or a large widget so you can just have a one of your workspaces open or you can just do a quick open if you want to dive right in to an important note people are talking about craft a lot on social media and for a good reason it's really full featured it's putting the ipad front and center and visually it's stunning so should you check it out absolutely what's the price it's free for up to a thousand blocks that's enough to get you started for sure and it's really cheap to to push beyond that and get some extra features if you want to all right let's take a look at another app that's a little bit similar to the ones that i've already talked about but it's got some unique stuff okay it's called journal and not only is it productivity focus but it also has a focus on keeping you sane keeping your mind clear not getting overloaded so simply put journal is a space to organize all your ideas you make a space for every project or topic and you can throw in here websites and videos and podcasts and emails and images and notes all kinds of media can live in here and look good and stay organized sign in with apple you gotta love that so this actually does do a good job of bringing your projects to life in a whole different way lots of personality here let's say you're planning a trip you can throw in trip details from websites that you found from reviews from your email like confirmations for instance it can all live here in the same space but let's actually check it out it's all about spaces i'm going to create a new space here called nitro coffee all right and i'm going to give it an icon nitro makes me happy so why not a smiley face i'm going to hit the plus icon here are the options new link new note section header something from my apps a file upload camera roll youtube and even spotify well let's pretend i'm learning how to make nitro coffee okay i'm gonna paste in a youtube url i'm gonna save that and then look how it shows up we got this nice little card here if i hit play it will just play right here without kicking me out into youtube which is awesome all right but i'm going to come in here and add in a link to an article about making nitro coffee and that's going to create this really nice looking card right above my video and then i can pick that up i can rearrange it so i think journal as you can see is very different from the other apps that we've covered today but the real appeal i think comes from that ease of organization you don't have to think too much about your folders or your tags or anything like that it's more about just getting content into the app into that inbox and then organizing it later as you need to so you know you've got it saved and that's what really counts that's what really matters and then you can come in here and access it organize it do what you want with it later and then if you need to and if you like this you can hit the pause button and it'll sort of make everything disappear and give you a break from your work which is always good you don't want to be a workaholic well that's where we're going to cut things off today i hope that you found a brand new exciting fun new useful app that's going to be a new go-to for you uh don't forget you guys can follow at daily tech spell daily t-e-k-k on instagram and twitter lots of exciting things being posted there all the time also check out the after party that's the podcast it's out on fridays it's getting more and more detailed it's a lot more educational than it used to be so if you like apple stuff you want to understand it better learn more about it then make sure to check that out these are all options they're ways to connect and i wish that you would check them out they're all linked up down below i'll catch you guys in the next video laterhey it's chris these are a few of my recent productivity focused ipad app discoveries and i'm really excited to see which one you think is going to be the best for you the first app that we're checking out today is called muse and it markets itself as a spatial canvas for your research notes your reading your sketching your screenshots and your bookmarks because get this to the muse team deep thinking doesn't happen in front of a computer it happens on your ipad i'm just going to read you a little quote here listen to what the muse team has to say about the ipad being a special place okay desktops are for the most complex sophisticated tasks phones are for when you're on the go for quick capture for saving etc tablets are an intermediate step for reading for annotating for forming ideas for rearranging ideas to the muse team your ipad is an intermediary step between doing really complicated sophisticated things on your desktop and between capturing and saving things from your phone it's this in-between place where you can interact with things in a very different way than on any other device including with the apple pencil that's a huge part of the muse experience in my mind muse is the closest thing to a digital whiteboard as you can actually get a place where you can just throw all kinds of things move them around and actually come in and annotate things just like you would on a real digital whiteboard except it has some digital superpowers it's like a whiteboard on steroids so you can tap to turn on or off the tools there's a place where you can add things like a board a photo a file some text or paste something but what muse does is it gives you some cards and you can pinch into and zoom back out of each of these cards here's an empty board i can say hi and then i can get out of that board here's a text card so i can come in here and actually do some more typing and then i can get back out of that it's very ipad native what i mean is it's made for pinching and zooming in gestures and touch and the apple pencil and then all of these cards can be stacked and arranged and then you can use your apple pencil to come in and mark all of those things up it's pretty amazing now look what i did i came in here and i pasted this youtube video from andy mineo man i love how you can mark this up it's awesome and i can tap on that and it will take me to that youtube video which is great let me drop in a photo of some coffee that i had for breakfast today i can come in here and write on it i can zoom back out i think you're starting to see how this is very different than other ipad apps i do wish however that i had taken the time to install a paper like on this ipad because it feels weird without it i've gotten so used to it that it's just not as good of an experience without my paper like you forget after using it for a while how paper-like it actually is and how unpaper-like the ipad is all by itself without that screen cover but when you really need to get into an idea or a topic and do some planning and things need to be messy then this is a place that will actually let you connect things in a very fluid way without being too rigid and that's why it's so awesome one thing you'll notice is that the pencil kit tools are very minimal and they only show up when you need them it's just a very fluid and natural experience and honestly it's just unlike anything else that i've ever tried it's so cool too to be able to mix different kinds of elements because you know i know some people are really rigid and structured and they like a grid layout and everything to be organized just so i think this kind of an option is just gonna set a lot of people free when it comes to unlocking your ideas and organizing and thinking in a different way now here's something that's kind of funny the muse people said no we're going to make an ipad app first and the iphone app is just going to be a companion to the ipad app so they fully expect you to capture things on your phone but not do any work there the work actually comes within the ipad app itself and that's a super unique approach i feel like a lot of people start with the iphone or the mac and then kind of replicate that experience the best they can on other devices but here they're like no really the ipad is the best for this type of usage and the iphone actually plays a useful unnecessary but supporting role the next app that we're talking about is called craft it's a note-taking app which do we really need another note-taking app we have apple notes we have good notes notability bear notion the list goes on and on and on but craft is actually crafted for the ipad first and that makes a huge huge difference it does work on the mac it does work on the iphone but it really takes advantage of touch and drag and drop and it's visual first and it just feels native to the ipad and if you're an ipad user that's a big big deal now right off the bat you're going to see that this is a block based notes app so that lets you do some really unique things notion of course is also block based probably the thing that popularized block based note taking and kraft kind of picks that idea up and runs with it it's gonna let you add a block from photos or your camera from stock photos like unsplash you can add a sketch a scan some files you can insert code a formula plain text and there are some real benefits to working with blocks i mean it's really easy to drag something to a different place and reorder it for instance of course you can bulk edit things you know if you want to group stuff together that's really handy here but i kind of like that it doesn't go nuts with the blocks notion is almost too in-depth there's so many block options that can be overwhelming for people right and i think most people probably end up not even fully exploring everything that notion can do this does a lot but it keeps it simpler so by default and craft you get a page but anything within that page can also be turned into its own page so you kind of end up with page section it's like pages within pages within pages if you want something else that's cool is that you can change how each page looks so you can kind of give it its own feel and personality so i can click these dots i can say page style i can give it a cover image so i'm just going to come in here and pick a random photo for my header i can choose to show the title or not or the author i can give the block spacing a dynamic or classic look if i like the margins on the side i can keep those at regular or i can say give me a wide view but it's got some fun tricks i can come in and hit slash and choose from all kinds of different types of blocks like a list block maybe a to-do block with the slash that's how you can change colors or indent or align things i can even do things like insert the date which is really handy now let's see what happens when i paste a url look at that i got a card here which takes me to a nice little preview without jumping into safari or the browser now this url preview is a good example of a card and you can style these cards a little bit differently you can do small regular or large for your cards and by the time that you end up with a several different cards this really makes for a great way to visually see and organize things right isn't this so much better than just seeing an actual text link in yellow like you see in apple notes in fact any kind of media that you put in here comes in as a card so here's an andy mineo music video and i'm just gonna give it a small card here what happens when i click on it it opens up preview i can see it right here all right here's what it looks like when i paste in a tweet again it comes in as a card this one i'm gonna style as a bigger version and you know what let's do this one as a bigger one too and then once you get a bunch of these cards in you can come in and drag those around and reorder them which is great now look here's something that's cool here's kind of an outline that i made for a video but if i come in here and select a bunch of blocks and i'm like hey those are related they should be their own page i can easily group those together and then look it's created a page within a page here then i can come in and give that group a title and it's just a super cool way to organize your thoughts and then of course i can pick that up and drag that around now you can come in here and create a sketch block which will then let you use the apple pencil so your apple pencil is supported but it's just the very basic default pencil kit apple pencil experience i love that i can take a block and drag it over to the side and do a side by side view of my notes within craft you can have multiple instances open the split screen support is incredibly good and then of course i can come in and drag and drop stuff between the note that i just put over in the side window and that works for your blocks as well if you need to transfer them something else that's very cool is that it has some widget support so you can get a small medium or a large widget so you can just have a one of your workspaces open or you can just do a quick open if you want to dive right in to an important note people are talking about craft a lot on social media and for a good reason it's really full featured it's putting the ipad front and center and visually it's stunning so should you check it out absolutely what's the price it's free for up to a thousand blocks that's enough to get you started for sure and it's really cheap to to push beyond that and get some extra features if you want to all right let's take a look at another app that's a little bit similar to the ones that i've already talked about but it's got some unique stuff okay it's called journal and not only is it productivity focus but it also has a focus on keeping you sane keeping your mind clear not getting overloaded so simply put journal is a space to organize all your ideas you make a space for every project or topic and you can throw in here websites and videos and podcasts and emails and images and notes all kinds of media can live in here and look good and stay organized sign in with apple you gotta love that so this actually does do a good job of bringing your projects to life in a whole different way lots of personality here let's say you're planning a trip you can throw in trip details from websites that you found from reviews from your email like confirmations for instance it can all live here in the same space but let's actually check it out it's all about spaces i'm going to create a new space here called nitro coffee all right and i'm going to give it an icon nitro makes me happy so why not a smiley face i'm going to hit the plus icon here are the options new link new note section header something from my apps a file upload camera roll youtube and even spotify well let's pretend i'm learning how to make nitro coffee okay i'm gonna paste in a youtube url i'm gonna save that and then look how it shows up we got this nice little card here if i hit play it will just play right here without kicking me out into youtube which is awesome all right but i'm going to come in here and add in a link to an article about making nitro coffee and that's going to create this really nice looking card right above my video and then i can pick that up i can rearrange it so i think journal as you can see is very different from the other apps that we've covered today but the real appeal i think comes from that ease of organization you don't have to think too much about your folders or your tags or anything like that it's more about just getting content into the app into that inbox and then organizing it later as you need to so you know you've got it saved and that's what really counts that's what really matters and then you can come in here and access it organize it do what you want with it later and then if you need to and if you like this you can hit the pause button and it'll sort of make everything disappear and give you a break from your work which is always good you don't want to be a workaholic well that's where we're going to cut things off today i hope that you found a brand new exciting fun new useful app that's going to be a new go-to for you uh don't forget you guys can follow at daily tech spell daily t-e-k-k on instagram and twitter lots of exciting things being posted there all the time also check out the after party that's the podcast it's out on fridays it's getting more and more detailed it's a lot more educational than it used to be so if you like apple stuff you want to understand it better learn more about it then make sure to check that out these are all options they're ways to connect and i wish that you would check them out they're all linked up down below i'll catch you guys in the next video later\n"