How to Use Toodle-Do

A complete walkthrough of the app, section by section.

The Basics

Toodle-Do splits your iPad screen in two: your to-do notecard stays pinned at the top, and your doodle notebook fills the rest below it. Flip between notebook pages as much as you like — your to-do list never moves or changes underneath you.

On iPhone there's no doodle notebook, since that's built around Apple Pencil — instead you get a focused, full-screen version of just the to-do list.

Your To-Do List

Adding a task

Tap + New task to add one — new tasks always land at the bottom of your list.

Shortcut: draw anything — any mark at all — in the small scratch-pad square next to the "To-Do" title, and a new blank task appears instantly.

Working through a task

Tap a task's checkbox to move it forward. Tap the same box again later to keep advancing:

Empty → tap → a single accent-colored slash appears (a soft click plays) — task started
tap again → the box fills green with a check mark (a second, slightly deeper click plays) — task done
tap again → back to empty, no sound

Reordering and cleaning up

Drag a task by its grip handle (the small stacked lines on the right of each row) to reorder your list.
Swipe a task left to delete it.
Tap Clear done to remove everything you've finished. Tap it again right away — it relabels itself Clear all — to wipe the whole list. That relabel is a built-in safety net against clearing everything by accident.

Favorite words

In Setup (the gear icon), add words or abbreviations you use often. They show up as quick-tap buttons above the task composer, and Toodle-Do also teaches them to your device's system dictionary so autocorrect and Scribble stop changing them.

Minimizing the card

On iPad, tap the chevron in the card's header to collapse it down to just its title bar — handy when you want a notebook page to have the full screen for a while.

Your Doodle Notebook

iPad only

Page settings

Tap the sliders icon in the toolbar (next to the sidebar toggle) to open a page settings panel covering everything about the current page in one place:

Rename it and see when it was created
Tag it as Meeting, Daily Notes, or Project — or pick one of your own custom tags (set those up in Setup)
Background — switch between a dot-grid page and a plain one, and if dot-grid is on, pick from five grid colors

Finding pages

Use the sort menu to order pages by newest, oldest, or title; the filter menu to show only pages carrying a specific tag; and the search field to find a page by name.

Drawing

Tap the pen button (the pen-nib icon) any time to draw — it always brings back plain freehand ink, whatever tool you were just using. Tap the color dot at the far right of the toolbar to choose a color and thickness.
Tap the eraser icon to erase. Press it a second time to switch erasing modes, shown by its color: blue erases only the part of a stroke you actually touch, while pink erases an entire stroke at a single touch — a bigger, more aggressive action, so the color is a deliberate warning, not just decoration. Long-press the eraser to set its size.
Scroll with a two-finger drag. The pencil always draws, and a single finger is reserved for working with text boxes. And pages never run out of room — more blank space is added underneath as you near the bottom, endlessly.
Undo and redo cover ink strokes, shapes, and text boxes together, in one shared history.

Drawing perfect shapes

Tap the shapes button (the square-overlapping-a-circle icon) to switch the pen into shape mode. While it's on:

Draw a rough line, circle, oval, square, rectangle, triangle — even a slanted box or a zigzag — and when you lift the pencil it snaps into a clean, straight-edged version, in your current pen color and thickness.
Or draw and then hold the pencil still for a moment: the shape snaps into place while you're still touching, and you can keep dragging to adjust it — a line's endpoint follows your pencil, and circles and boxes resize — then lift to keep it.
If a snap guesses wrong, Undo brings back exactly what you drew.
Scribbles and curvy doodles that aren't really a shape are left exactly as you drew them.

Tap the shapes button again to return to normal freehand ink.

Adding typed text

Tap the text-box icon, then drag out a rectangle anywhere on the page — a text box appears there, ready to type into right away.

Once a box already has text in it, it behaves in two steps to keep your Apple Pencil from getting confused with typed text:

Tap it once with your finger to select it — this reveals a drag bar along its top and a resize handle (the small circle with the diagonal arrows) at its bottom-right corner.
Tap again directly on the text to start typing.

While a box is not selected, Apple Pencil strokes pass straight through it as ink on the page — so you can draw right over or near existing text boxes without accidentally triggering text selection or handwriting recognition. Only a finger tap selects a box.

To move a selected box, drag it by the handle bar at its top. To resize it, drag the circular handle at its bottom-right corner. To delete it, long-press the handle bar and choose Delete.

Tap empty page background to deselect whatever box you were working with.

Making It Yours

Tap the gear icon on the to-do card to open Setup:

Appearance — Light, Dark, or follow your device's System setting.
Color Palette — choose a built-in palette, or build your own for your pen colors.
Favorite Words — manage your quick-insert word list.
Doodle Page Types — create, edit, or delete your own custom page tags: a label, an icon, and a color.

Syncing Across Devices

Toodle-Do syncs your tasks — and, on iPad, your notebook pages — through iCloud automatically. There's no separate account or sign-in inside the app. Just make sure the devices you want kept in sync are signed into the same Apple ID with iCloud turned on, and changes made on one will show up on the other.

To see where you stand, open Setup (the gear icon) and check the iCloud Sync line at the bottom — it shows when your data last reached iCloud. If syncing ever runs into trouble, a small pink cloud icon also appears at the top of the screen; tap it to see what's going on. One caution: work done while offline lives only on that device until a sync completes — so if that icon is showing, don't delete the app, and give it a minute on Wi-Fi once you're back online.