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I want to illustrate technical ideas with it quickly and dirty, possibly sharing over a chat screen share. NOT create document-grade formal diagrams.

I tried Graffle and Affinity Designer. Didn't like them. They are like Photoshop (apps with 250 features) where I need just Ms Paint.

  • has to support apple pencil on iPadOS 17.5
  • it has to be unorthodox.
  • It has to tidy up links and shapes

I want a free-drawing tool that converts my doodles into closest shape like circle or rectangle, wiggly lines into connectors. Optionally, I’d like writing converted to text.

It doesn't need to be perfect and formally looking. Even more - its a plus if it looks informally as if you sat with a colleague in a park a drew a diagram on paper whole discussing a problem at lunch.

It should be vector graphic (large zoom and no pixels) and have basic editing capabilities

Basically I want Notes.app (that's included) with additional feature - smoothing doodles into shapes and writing into text.

What apps meet these needs?

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    Have you tried Apple's own Freeform app? Macrumors provides a decent writeup.
    – Andy Griffiths
    Commented Jul 2 at 23:21
  • ah thats a good one! thanks
    – Boppity Bop
    Commented Jul 3 at 7:54
  • Great requirements. Rather than repeating you don’t want photoshop, if people don’t understand what’s orthodox and what’s not you could show images of what you don’t want.
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Jul 3 at 12:22

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Apple's own Freeform app will provide collaborative diagramming for macOS Ventura and iOS 16 / iPadOS 16, and later devices.

There's a decent write up on Macrumors also.

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  • Does Freeform snap a drawn square into a proper square as the OP is asking? I can’t figure out how to do that and have to deploy a shape square which is much slower than having the tool tidy up my doodles…
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Jul 3 at 18:34
  • @bmike Unfortunately I'm not sure. I have neither the iPad capable of running iPadOS 16, nor a pencil. I know it doesn't on macOS 14 (but then line drawing is minimally supported in that version, as per your other post on the subject) or on iOS16 (I do have a phone that can run it).
    – Andy Griffiths
    Commented Jul 3 at 23:41
  • I have the iPad and the pencil and can’t find how to enable it if it’s even possible there…
    – bmike ♦
    Commented Jul 4 at 0:29
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My choice for this is Linea Sketch

Yes it has lots of features, ones you need are background (I like butcher paper) and zip shapes and they are free features. You won’t likely need or want to pay for the pro features and it stays out of your way. You have a canvas and you draw, hide the colors when you don’t need them.

Linea screen grab embedded in a Freeform document

Above is what you would see in Linea drawing freehand, and then allowing their tool to fix the shapes. I embedded that screen grab in a Freeform document to show how arrows on Freeform are nicer (almost as nice as graffle) but I don’t know if you can get shapes corrected after drawn. You’ll have to place them, which seems more “orthodox” and less “sketch” to me.

There’s nothing that does arrows and diagrams as well as Omni Graffle, but that is no longer being developed for iPad and probably too formal for your needs.

Start with Linea, then try Freeform is my recommendation before then going to the many App Store stories recommending drawing and sketching apps. The above three have been all I need and each does a different take on drawing for me very well. Neither Linea nor Freeform is vector for drawing, but the shapes and zoom are high, high quality and you shouldn’t ever see pixels if you don’t want to once you learn to set your scale.

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