Carbo Review

If you find that writing or drawing your plans out by hand helps you to get them in order, you’re far from alone. But storing things digitally does tend to make them easier to find and sort. Carbo bridges the gap between these two, letting you take (or import) photos of drawings on paper or whiteboard, then digitizing them. It clears out things like the paper, leaving you with only the information itself. It’s not the first app to try something like this, but its results are among the most impressive we’ve seen.

Snap a photo and it will detect the lines, which you can then imediately make stronger or softer — our writing came out very weak at first, but tweaking the slider made it clear. Once you’ve grabbed the image, you can tag it, to make it easy to search for things relating to a certain project or topic, and you can store it locally or in the cloud to access from anywhere — all really easy.

In this core functionality, Carbo is very strong. Where it falls short is in the details of the other things you might want to do with your notes. There’s no handwriting support for adding to them within the app, nor is there OCR for extracting what they say to a text-editing app easily. You can export images to another app that will let you do these, but seeing as Carbo’s subtitle is “Handwriting in the Digital Age” we kind of expected it to step up itself.

You do have some editing options, including the ability to highlight portions of the notes, then tweak only the selected lines, making them thicker or thinner, moving and resizing them, or deleting them completely. Getting used to how the highlighting works can take a little while, but it’s potentially quite powerful.

Exporting is strangely hidden away too — you can’t do it from the main menu, and it’s not a direct option when viewing a note – you have to tap the palette icon, where you can apply some styles to your note before export. Again, nice, but inessential, and kind of just...in the way.

The bottom line. Its tech is great, but it could be much more useful.