Apple Pencil Question: Maps and PDFs

[santaliqueur]

Hey everyone. I'm a contractor, and I had a question about the Apple Pencil. I want to do two separate things:

1. I want to mark up maps.

My business is such that I can drive down the street and see if I want to work on a particular house or not. I send flyers to those houses I've already decided I'd work on and if they decide to respond to the ad and use my services, I know it's not a house I want to avoid. I want to have an easy way to notate whether or not I've driven down a street, as I am driving all over every surrounding town. Currently I am capturing addresses with Ulysses and then just remembering where I drove. My memory will soon get confused with where I drove, and I want to use the amazing technology we have to help me!

Is there any mapping service compatible with Apple Pencil? It doesn't have to be too fancy, but I would like to be able to keep track of this. I'm not interested in capturing PDFs of the maps and then marking them up, as I plan to be doing this for several surrounding towns, potentially several thousand streets.

2. I want to mark up PDFs (but in a certain fashion)

I have a PDF estimate sheet I give to customers that has a grid on it, think graph paper occupying the middle 60% of a sheet of paper, with other text and graphics being the rest. The grid is always there, and I want to be able to draw thicker lines along the grid (different colors would be nice). I'd like to be able to draw lines that snap to the grid itself. I assume marking up a PDF itself would be easy, but I want to snap to the grid (or make it easy to do so).

Thanks!

 

[kevroc]

That's going to take some outside of the box thinking...

Maps might be a bit problematic if you want specific houses and house numbers on there. Your closest bet would be to snapshot some Google/Apple Maps and then mark those images up using a tool like notability, annotable or whatever. Breaking up your driving into grids would help remember things as well.

You could also incorporate photos so you have a picture of the house and use the GPS info to place that photo on a map like apple does with the photos app.

With the PDF estimate sheet. Sounds like you need an app that can import an image (a grid diagram) that you can use as a template, and instead of a snap to grid (since you won't find that) you could use an app that has a built-in ruler that you could align with the grid to draw perfect lines along the grid outline. There's a couple of apps like Graphic that actually can snap to a straight line.

It would require a bit of trial and error, but that's part of the fun of these things as that's how you can learn.

 

[santaliqueur]

Thanks for the reply! A couple of things:

Maps might be a bit problematic if you want specific houses and house numbers on there. Your closest bet would be to snapshot some Google/Apple Maps and then mark those images up using a tool like notability, annotable or whatever. Breaking up your driving into grids would help remember things as well.

I don't need specific house numbers, I just need to know whether or not I drove down a particular street. Snapshotting a mapping application might work, but it would be a lot to keep track of as I plan to drive all over many towns. I could do it with grids, but I was hoping for native support in a mapping application so I wouldn't have to.

With the PDF estimate sheet. Sounds like you need an app that can import an image (a grid diagram) that you can use as a template, and instead of a snap to grid (since you won't find that) you could use an app that has a built-in ruler that you could align with the grid to draw perfect lines along the grid outline. There's a couple of apps like Graphic that actually can snap to a straight line.

I figured the "snap to a particular line" might be too much of a request, but snapping to a straight line would work, since I'd just have to be precise about where I started the line itself.

Thanks again, and I'll be thinking about this a lot more after the rumored iPad Pro refresh!

 

[kevroc]

If you don't need specific house numbers, could you use the map functionality of "dropping a pin" to designate streets you've been down? I know in Google Maps you can drop a pin and then Label that pin and also categorize it to a list. You could have a list of "Good Streets", "Bad Streets", "Maybes", etc. It would be pretty easy to view afterwards also as they would show up in your web browser on your computer/desktop if you go to google maps if you are logged in under the same account name.


The apps "Graphic" and "Concept" are more like line drawing programs that allow you to have your paper be like graph paper with a definable grid pattern. Then you can turn on the snap to grid feature so lines you draw are straight. You could probably do some type of thin line grid overlaying the one on paper so it appears your lines are "snapping" to YOUR grid when it fact it's just snapping to the grid they are drawn on as well.

There's a neat feature in a lot of drawing apps called "layers". It allows you to create a drawing on layer 1 (say your grid template) then switch to layer 2 for the house specific stuff without affecting layer 1. They act as overlays like transparencies.

Also waiting for the new ipad Love my IPP with Pencil and waiting for any improvements coming along. At the end of the day though, I'm more limited by app capability on the iPad rather than the iPad itself...