OneDrive for iOS Gets a Fluent Overhaul

Color, Fonts, and Softer Looks inOneDrive for iOS

You’ve got to love the phrases Microsoft comes up with to describe changes made to their software. On July 17, they announced a redesigned OneDrive mobile app for iOS that includes a “splash of color” in the header and changes to font sizes and colors to make lists of files more legible. Lastly, the “command sheet” (options available from the […] menu) has a softer look and a draggable surface.

All of this brings joy to the hearts of graphic designers, but the single biggest joy in OneDrive for iOS is its ability annotate and add notes to PDFs. Although the refresh promises to make things even easier, the functionality is pretty good in version 10.75.9 (updated on July 18).

PDF Markup and Notation

To test things out, I opened the PDF for the sample chapter for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2020 Edition) eBook from a folder synchronized with a SharePoint document library and scrawled “Sample” across the front cover (Figure 1). You can also see a note added to highlight something in the PDF. You can download the sample chapter here.

Apart from my appalling inability to write “sample” in a legible manner, the interaction is smooth and easy. As always, the larger the screen, the easier it is to mark up documents, but OneDrive for iOS is more than acceptable.

I do wonder how many people know that they can markup PDFs with OneDrive for iOS like this. It’s the kind of feature that you’d expect in the SharePoint mobile app, which doesn’t yet support it.

Microsoft and PDFs

Microsoft is making PDFs easier to work with in other ways. A recent Petri.com article explains how you can use a new file handler to avoid the need to download PDFs from SharePoint document libraries before you can work with them. The file handler redirects the PDFs to the Adobe Document Cloud where you can annotate and mark them up them in a similar manner to OneDrive for iOS.