Microsoft has added what it called a “top requested feature” to iPad. The new update means that users can go into handwriting mode and with any stylus of your choosing start to make notes or doodle “to you heart’s content”. There are tons of options available, including 20 different colors to choose from, a range of ink thickness settings, highlighting, and the capability of zooming in to write in more detail.

One of the more impressive features is Palm Rejection, which makes handwriting easier by giving you a set of images that best describe how you hold a pen. Talking about Palm Rejection Microsoft said, “It’s a neat trick that worked well during our limited testing.” The company added that years of research into how people use pens has paid off and OneNote for iPad is the result.

Optical character recognition (OCR) has also been added, which means that text search within all images is possible as long as the images are saved to OneDrive. The process is simple, just save an image with text inside of it to OneDrive, and then in a few minutes you’ll be able to find images of the selected text by using OneNote. What’s good about this is that Microsoft is continually adding support for different languages. There are 21 languages currently available: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish. OCR works on all versions of OneNote.

OneNote for iPad can be downloaded from the Apple’s App Store. OneNote for desktop  2013 for Windows 7 and Windows 8 is currently available for free.

Photo: Microsoft OneNote digital ink screenshot