This is the perfect tool for pen-and-paper type of note-takers who just want a consistent place to jot down their thoughts. If you need an easy place to keep ideas straight, this app can handle it all—without giving you the headache of navigating through any extra bells and whistles. IWork is, in my opinion, one of the best word processors available for Mac and although I use LyX for most things, having a proper word processor which can read Word documents is a necessity. IWork features three programs, Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheets) and Keynote (presentations).

After resisting the temptation for several months, I finally broke down this week and bought an Apple Pencil. I when it first came out, but sold it and switched to the 9.7-inch model last week, and so far I’ve been very happy with that choice. Figuring that I’ll probably stick with this size iPad Pro for at least a year, I decided the Apple Pencil would be a worthwhile investment. And I was right. I was skeptical of the it was first announced, as I assumed it would just be the same as the tacky styluses third-parties had been making for years, but after using it I’ve realized just how wrong I was. The thing that I noticed very early on in my time with the Apple Pencil though, was how crazy good the palm rejection is.

Writing with an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro is nearly as easy as writing on actual paper. As a student, this is a huge factor for me when it comes to note taking, so I decided to dive a little deeper into the apps on iOS that are made for taking notes and are optimized for iPad Pro.

Here are some of the ones I would recommend. GoodNotes 4 GoodNotes is an app that I wasn’t entirely familiar with until I purchased my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, but I’ve quickly realized that it’s one of, if not the most, complete note taking apps available in the App Store. You have the ability to create multiple notebooks – like one for each class or subject – and then create individual pages within each notebook with varying page styles. There’s also the ability to insert charts and images which definitely comes in handy.

GoodNotes also indexes your notes so you can quickly search them. I have pretty awful handwriting, but it was still able to correctly index my notes and allow me to search through them when I needed to.

It also supports the Apple Pencil for pressure sensitive writing, something that really comes in handy while taking extensive amounts of notes at a time. To me, GoodNotes 4 felt most similar to traditional notebooks when it came to taking notes. It really felt like writing with pen and paper, just modernized with many new features. GoodNotes 4 is available for $7.99 on the App Store and is definitely worth it. Notability Notability and GoodNotes are very similar apps on the surface, and if anything, Notability feels slightly more polished and easier to use than GoodNotes. It offers many of the same features as other handwriting apps, including palm-rejection, pressure sensitivity detection, and the ability to insert images, charts, and even full webpages.

That last feature is notable as it means you can import a webpage and highlight and mark it up as you go, something that’s important for working through research projects and the like. One thing that’s unfortunately missing and that will ultimately force me to stick with GoodNotes, however, is the ability to search handwritten notes. While you can search PDF text, any notes you write by hand are not capable of being searched. On the bright side though, Notability is currently 33 percent off on the App Store, making it just $3.99 as of this post. Notes Plus is another solid note taking app with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil optimizations. In addition to standard features like PDF and image support, folder management, and shape detection, Notes Plus includes a few standout features. For one, it supports a built-in browser for quickly and easily looking up facts and statistics.

Additionally, it supports the ability to covert handwritten notes to text. This means that any handwritten notes are also searchable and later annotatable, unlike with Notability. There’s also support for recording background audio. For instance, if you’re in a lecture, you can be recording that lecture directly into the app so you can later go back and listen to it to ensure you didn’t miss anything.