iPadOS 13 and iOS 13 included many changes that gave developers the opportunity to make their apps much better. Some developers have done a great job taking advantage of the new operating system, which has been great to see. GoodNotes is a sponsor of iPhone J.D. this month, which gives me a good excuse to discuss the extensive improvement that were made to this app to take advantage of iPadOS 13.
But before I do so, let me note that GoodNotes has been my favorite app for taking handwritten notes on the iPad for many years, long before it first became a sponsor last month. I use this app almost every day in my law practice, whether I am taking notes while on the phone or in a meeting, talking to a client, in a CLE, or in court. GoodNotes comes with lots of different paper styles, or you can take any PDF document and turn it into a template for the virtual paper in a notebook. GoodNotes comes with a legal pad template, but I prefer to use one that I created myself because I like having the dotted red lines on the left and right side. If you want to download my legal paper template and use it yourself with your own notebooks in GoodNotes, click here to download my legal paper template file. Also, while GoodNotes is primarily an app to use on an iPad, there is also an iPhone app which syncs all of your notebooks. Thus, if you need to look at something from your notes and you only have your iPhone with you, you still have access to your notes.
Here are the features that are new to GoodNotes on an iPad running iPadOS 13:
Multiple windows of GoodNotes at the same time
You can now have two instances of GoodNotes running side-by-side. This opens up lots of possibilities. Sometimes I use this because I want to review one set of notes while I am writing another set of notes.
Sometimes I use this to open two instances of the same set of notes so that I can use different pages. For example, I often attend a meeting where there is an agenda sent around by email before the meeting. I will often make the first page of notes the agenda. If it is a PDF file, I just insert that file before the first page of notes. Then I take my notes. A few pages in, I may find that it is helpful to see the agenda at the same time that I am taking notes, and with GoodNotes 5.3, this is now easy. I can put my agenda on the left (page 1 of the notes) while I continue to handwrite on the right side on a different page of the notes.
There are lots of ways that you can start the dual-screen mode. First, when you are looking at one document in GoodNotes, you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen to reveal the dock and then drag GoodNotes app from your dock to the right side of the screen, where it will open up a new instance of GoodNotes. Second, if you already have multiple tabs in use in GoodNotes, you can hold down on one of the tabs and drag it over to the right side. Third, when you are looking at all of your folders or documents in the library view, just select a folder or document and drag it over to the right side of the screen. Or you can use the action menu on any one document to select Open in New Window. Fourth, when you are looking at all of the pages of a single document in the thumbnail view, just drag any page to the right to create a new window. Fifth, if you have at least two tabs open, you will an icon at the top right of each notebook; tap that icon to see an option to open that notebook in a new window.
It is great to have all of these options to start the two-window mode. Suffice it to say however it feels natural to you to open a second window in GoodNotes, that approach is likely to be supported.
Although I mostly use the two-window approach so that I can look at something on the left while I write on the right, you can also copy something from one notebook to the other one. Use the lasso tool to draw a circle around something in one notebook. Then tap down on your selection and hold for just a second, until the object seems to lift off of the screen a little bit. Now you can drag to the other window, and when you do so whatever you copied will be pasted.
If you have the thumbnail view open on one of the sides, you can drag a page of that document into the other document. This approach creates an image of the document and inserts that image in the second document. Because you can scale this image larger or stronger, you can use this feature if you want to annotate a document but there isn't enough room in the margins. With this method, you can move an image of a document into a page, then scale the image to whatever size you want, and then the margins around the image give you lots of space to write in the margins about the document.
Presentation Mode
When you use GoodNotes and your iPad is connected to an external monitor, you can decide what kind of Presenter Mode works best for you. One option is to just mirror the entire screen; the audience sees everything that you see. Another option is to mirror the presenter page. That way, the audience sees everything on the screen except that the audience doesn't see the tools and other interface elements. Thus, the audience won't see as you select a new pencil or pen or highlighter; they will just see what you write as you are writing it. Third, there is a similar view called mirror full page. This is similar to the second mode except that when you zoom in on your iPad, the audience will continue to see the full page. Thus, you can zoom in to write or draw something in a more precise fashion but the audience will just see the end result.
Note that there is also a laser pointer function in GoodNotes, so you can show your audience notes and then use the laser pointer to emphasize certain things while you are speaking.
If you are using the new side-by-side window function, the audience will only see one of the windows. Thus, you can have your presentation notes open in a window that only you can see as you write something in the window that your audience can see.
Dark Mode
If you enjoy using Dark Mode on your iPad, GoodNotes works with that too. Of course, your paper will probably be white or yellow or some other color, so to fully take advantage of Dark Mode, choose one of the new dark paper templates so that you are writing on dark paper. So far I've only played around with this mode, but if you are taking handwritten notes in a very dark environment, I can see it being much less obnoxious to use Dark Mode with a dark paper background.
OCR scanning
I mentioned above that I often take the meeting agenda and make that the first page of my notes. This is easy to do if someone previously sent you the agenda in a PDF file. What if they just hand you a piece of paper with the agenda? That isn't a problem thanks to the new OCR scanning feature.
Tap the + button at the top right to add a new page, and then select Scan Documents. You can then use your iPad to take a picture of the document. Edge detection is automatic, but you can adjust the corners yourself or switch to manual mode. GoodNotes will take a picture of the document and will also use OCR to look for all of the words in the document, and then the picture of the document becomes the next page of your notes in your notebook. Because of the OCR function, you can` search for all pages in a notebook that contain in a specific word — even if the word was on the document that you scanned. And of course, once the document is in GoodNotes, you can write on top of it to annotate it.
For any attorney who, like me, works with paper documents but wants to make them digital, GoodNotes is now even more useful.
New iPadOS gestures
iPadOS 13 and iOS 13 brought new editing gestures that can be triggered when you put three fingers on the screen. Three-finger swipe left is undo, three-finger swipe right is redo, and hold down three fingers on the screen for a second to bring up the menu. (The new three-finger pinch gestures to cut, copy, and paste do not appear to be supported in GoodNotes.)
GoodNotes also supports the new multiple item gesture of iPadOS 13. When you are in the thumbnail view, touch the screen with two fingers on top of one page of a document and then start to swipe to the left or right to select other pages. This switches you into the selection mode (without having to even tap "Select" first) and allows you to select multiple page as you slide your two fingers over to them. This is a much more efficient way to select multiple contiguous pages in a document.
Conclusion
If you own an iPad and a stylus and you are not yet taking digital notes on your iPad, I strongly encourage you to try doing so with the GoodNotes app. This is a fantastic app — one of the most useful apps on my iPad, and a key part of my paperless law practice. Thanks again to GoodNotes for sponsoring iPhone J.D. this month.
Click here to get GoodNotes 5 ($7.99): 
