You can sign a PDF on your Mac using the giant MacBook trackpad, and you can mark up PDFs and screenshots, too. But all that stuff is much easier on the iPad, especially if you have an Apple Pencil. The problem is getting it there. But in macOS Catalina, you don’t have to “get it” anywhere. Screenshots and PDFs magically show up on nearby iPads, where you can sign them or mark them up. Then you can return them to your Mac. These features are called Continuity Sketch and Continuity Markup, and they’re killer.

You know how the UPS guy holds up his brown scanner box for you to sign? PDF markup is like that, only on your iPad — and you never feel guilty about ordering too many parcels.

Instant Markup is one of the best parts of the iOS screenshot tool, and in iOS 13 and iPadOS it’s better than ever. The tools are more flexible, you get more colors, and it even remembers your selections for next time. It still doesn’t offer all the advanced features of a markup app like Annotable (you can’t pixelate parts of the image, for example), but it’s more than good enough for most uses.

Let’s see what’s new in the iOS 13 screenshot markup tool.

Scenario: Your divorce papers finally came through, and you can’t wait to sign the things. The trouble is, your spouse already took your office and your home, and you have no way to print or fax the documents.  Or perhaps you need to stick your autograph on some other document, but all you have is your iPhone or iPad.

No worries. With recent versions of iOS, it’s easier than ever to sign a PDF form and return it to the sender. In fact, you don’t even need to leave the Mail app to do it.

The Apple Pencil 2 is way better than version 1.0. It’s always charged. It’s always there on the side of your iPad, ready to use. And now that it supports tap gestures, it’s also a lot more powerful. But it doesn’t stop there.

Check out these excellent Apple Pencil 2 tips and tricks to take your Apple stylus usage to the next level.

iOS 12 doesn’t really have any huge new standout features. It’s more a collection of really solid improvements to iOS 11. It sounds odd to say that my favorite new feature is Do Not Disturb during Bedtime, but it’s made a big difference in how I use my iPhone.

Likewise with today’s Pro Tip. iOS markup for screenshots, PDFs and Photos was already good, but new options for the pen tools make it great.

If you like Instant Markup on iOS, then you’re going to love ShotBox. It’s a free app, available from the Mac App Store, that automatically pops up a panel of markup tools whenever you take a screenshot. It’s almost exactly like the Instant Markup tools built into iOS 11.

The Apple Pencil is way more useful in iOS 11 than it ever was before. That’s down to three new features. One is inline drawing in the Notes app, which lets you just start drawing anywhere in the middle of a text note. The other two, which we’ll cover today, are Instant Notes and Instant Markup, only one of which is actually instant.

Instant Notes lets you tap the lock screen of your iPad Pro, and have the iPad launch into a note, ready to draw or jot. It makes the iPad almost as convenient as a piece of paper in terms of just writing. Instant Markup, which is the least “instant” of the two, is a persistent, system-wide way to turn the screen into a PDF and mark it up.