John, I went ahead and bought a copy of Napkin, and it looks like a really useful app. Given what you want to do I think it is a very good fit. iMore did a
review video on YouTube. Take a look, it gives you a pretty good idea on what it can do. The call out feature is very handy.
Thanks James. I took a look at that
Napkin video and it does seem to be aimed directly at providing the tools for the tasks I described. For anyone doing these sorts of tasks frequently, it looks very good. The user interface looks interesting, making 'intelligent' guesses as to what you are tying to do and completing it for you – the video shows drawing a very rough circle and as soon as it's finished, Napkin makes it into a properly drawn circle.
Thanks Jack.
Acorn looks good too and the user interface looks more similar to what I'm used to, where you choose tools to create objects and can then select objects to change their properties. It too looks very good for anyone doing these sorts of tasks frequently.
Although I add arrows and labels to maps, aerial photos, diagrams, etc, I only produce them occasionally, just a few a year – I am retired. So it would be better value to get something with additional functionality.
Pages may not be quite as efficient or versatile as Napkin and Acorn for producing diagrams with labels, but it is probably sufficient for me and I hope would also give me functionality for different tasks. For example, I guess Pages would give me a page-layout functionality very different from Word, (because Word tends to be rather orientated around a linear flow of text, despite being able to insert graphics and text boxes and manipulate how they relate to the main body of text).
Thanks T'hain Esh Kelch and svenr. I had assumed that
Keynote would be similar to Pages in how you produce the sort of diagrams I have in mind. Can you explain why you think Keynote would be better than Pages?
Things that were good about
AppleWorks for this task were:
- I could paste in large images and work on them by going to Page Setup and setting reducing the Scale to, say, 10% and then view what I was working on at any magnification from 3.125% to 3200%!
- Objects could be positioned accurately by turning off the Autogrid and using the keyboard arrows.
- The Align Objects command allowed objects to be aligned vertically and/or horizontally, and by an edge (top, bottom, left, right) or by their centres.
- It gave good control over the relative position of layers.
- It was easy to set up arrows (say thick red ones to show the route on a map and thin black ones for call-outs) and text styles and colours and then copy them to new areas and edit them (eg, the words of a label, and the position, direction and length of an arrow).