I’m loving the app as usual. I have a suggestion on the handwritten sketch feature that was touched briefly on way back in 2020: Pinch and zoom a sketch/handwritten notes
I think the sketch feature works excellently, and don’t think it should be expanded to having infinite canvas, because this would shift the paradigm from date-focused linkable notes to canvasing, which is… different, and as you’ve mentioned, technically infeasible. In my case, I use it in meetings when I either have just the iPad, or both iPad and a laptop. If it’s just iPad, I might use sketch to handwrite notes on the entire meeting, because sometimes you need that flexibility. If it’s both, I start the meeting by adding a sketch object, keep it open on my iPad, then take typed notes on my laptop and add sketches when and where necessary. It’s been a great system so far.
However, a limitation is that the current sketch opens up in a strange aspect ratio that doesn’t make it clear how big your available workspace is. In Apple Notes for example, the width of the page is the width of your in-line sketch, and vertical scrolling is just dependent on how much sketching you do. In Agenda, it seems we can scroll horizontally and vertically, but not pinch to fill the page, which makes organizing the elements of your sketch haphazard. Without this ability to see the full screen shape of the drawing area, it is neither a canvas nor a sheet of paper, but somewhere in-between. Either it’s scrollable forever, like Freeform, or it’s fit to screen with zooming for detail, like a physical sheet of paper. Without this distinction, it’s hard to mindmap (where to place the central idea?), to draw diagrams (again, where to start the “centre” of the drawing), to write bullets (when do I do a “line wrap” and start a new line? how much more room do I have if I continue writing on one line), and more use-cases I’m sure… Hopefully this explanation makes sense. [Footnote: I’ve had this same problem with other apps e.g. LiquidText, where the “infinite canvas” actually starts in the top-right corner of the edge of the screen; this makes it hard to treat it as an infinite space because you’re already limited by what you’re looking at]
tl,dr: I’m re-proposing the functionality to pinch to zoom the handwritten sketch inserts as fit-to-screen so that you can see it as more like a piece of paper, and you can zoom in as needed for detail.
I believe that is how it is done. It allows zooming in, but not zooming out. The dimensions are 2 pages wide by 3 pages high, if I remember properly.
I think the choice to make it so you can’t zoom out was deliberate. If you can zoom in any direction, you lose a sense of scale. This way when you zoom out, you are at the native scale.
That should be how it already works, although there is no button, it is just fully zoom out to get to the page scale.
If you want to do a mind map, perhaps it is best just to aim to make it a single page, and zoom in to create the details. So the center is just in the middle.
Note too that whatever drawing you do gets recentered in the final product. You could literally draw the mind map in any corner, and Agenda should end up generating an image with it centered.
It would be good to improve this functionality in future, fully agree with that. Note also that there are apps like MindNode that can produce documents that you can embed in Agenda notes, and then even edit after the fact. That allows using more powerful drawing tools.
Thanks for the quick reply. Perhaps I am in some sort of edge case because your explanation isn’t my current experience when editing sketches.
Currently, I can neither zoom in or out – any two-finger actions are not responding. I can scroll left-right, and up-down with a single finger, but pinch to zoom is not working.
I totally acknowledge this, and it looks great, no changes asked here. What I’m referring to instead is the aspect ratio while actively working on a sketch. Perhaps there’s been a misunderstanding on that detail!
Since I have no two-finger functionality while editing a sketch, should I move this from feedback to a bug?
I think you are right. I was confusing the annotation function, where you open an image and draw on that. I believe there we allow zooming in.
I will put this on my list and see if we can allow at least zooming in.
Whatever we do, it is important that you can quickly find the natural scale, which is why we restricted it to begin with (I think). If you want to do some writing, it is quite frustrating when you are too far zoomed in or out.