Bamboo Paper: Transform Your iPad Into A Notebook (Sponsored)

When it comes to writing stuff down, if you’re anything like me then you may feel a little trapped by a keyboard, which doesn’t allow for your artistic penmanship to flourish. To break free of the shackles of typing, check out Bamboo Paper, a new app from Wacom that turns you iPad into a notebook that you can draw, write and doodle on to your heart’s content.

The iPad’s touchscreen keyboard can work wonders when typing up notes on the go, however, if you want to jot down notes and ideas complete with sketches or diagrams, or if you just fancy doing some good old-fashioned handwriting without getting through reams and reams of paper then Bamboo Paper is the app for you.

The actual app itself is very simple to operate, with an intuitive guidance system to maneuver your way around the app, switching ‘Notebooks’ that range from charts, graphs, staff papers and plain pages so you really can use it in any setting. You can use the Bamboo Stylus to act as a pen to put to the virtual paper; my favourite thing about this is that if you press and hold the screen then you can change the pen settings, altering the colour of the ink and font, allowing you to make notes and underline important things in red (I LOVE doing this!) or sketch different coloured pictures.

The most impressive element of the app is that your ideas aren’t just confined to the iPad’s screen; if you connect the iPad to a projector then you can display whatever you’ve written or drawn on a large screen, which is very useful for brainstorming sessions. It’s this function that really makes the app cross over from pleasure into business, making it a universally useful app for everyday life. The fact that you can also print and export pages to email allows for limitless sharing of your thoughts, musings and ideas.

Bamboo Paper also incorporates the classic iPad touchscreen controls, such as pinching two fingers over the screen to zoom and dragging to fingers to pan out of the screen, enabling you to focus on smaller details or view the whole picture. There are also settings to undo/redo, as well as ‘Clear Page’ to start afresh and bookmarking certain important notes, such as grocery lists or films that you want to rent, etc.

As with most free apps, there is also an in-app upgrade, which adds 20 new notebooks to your library, as well as benefiting from all of the new features that will be added over the next few months. A lot of users have said that they are happy with the free version; however, I personally think that the expenditure is worth it, seeing as you can expand the app’s library, which offers a lot more potential for optimizing everything that the app has to offer.

Summary

The iPad’s screen offers so much fantastic potential that to only use it for typing seems to be a waste; when you combine it with a stylus and a great and versatile app like Bamboo Paper, its possibilities are realized. No longer will you be bound to your keyboard, take that pen and write like you’ve never written before! (Oh, and think about the reduction of your carbon footprint with all that paper that you’ll save…)

Pros

• Very easy to use; you’ll be able to smoothly navigate the app from the first go.
• Using the Bamboo Stylus makes drawing on the iPad a real pleasure, as its chunky grip means that it feels like a Magic Marker.
• You can browse through your book by flicking through the thumbnail images.
• The pen strokes are some of the most natural that I’ve ever seen on any ‘handwriting app’.

Room For Improvement

It would be cool if the size of the eraser could be altered; possibly this will arrive with one of the upcoming updates.