An iPad (especially with an Apple Pencil) is a fantastic replacement for a legal pad or pen and paper, and I have been using my iPad to take notes for a very long time I first reviewed the app GoodNotes in 2012, and while I have tried similar apps over the last eleven years, I have always found GoodNotes to be the best writing app for me to use in my law practice and when I take notes for personal reasons. (The folks behind the app sponsored iPhone J.D. back in 2019, but haven’t done so since then.) A few weeks ago, the app was updated to version 6. One (slight) change was in the name: the “n” is no longer capitalized. So the new app is called Goodnotes. The icon is also slightly changed; you can tell you are using the latest version because the line at the bottom of the icon forms a smile. But of course, the major changes are seen once you launch the app. Here is what I like about this new version. Not everything is perfect, but this is still a nice set of new features.
New interface
The app has a fresh new interface that I think works much better.
First, when you are looking at all of your notebooks, instead of having tabs at the bottom, those different categories are now on the left side: Documents, Favorites, Search, Shared, and Marketplace. Part of the change was to make space for those last two categories, but this is the same layout used by many other professional iPad apps, and I prefer it.
Second, there is a fresh coat of paint, so to speak. When you are in the mode where you look at your folders containing notebooks, you can now assign colors and icons to folders. This makes it so much faster to quickly see and select the folder that you want. There are only 21 icons to choose from (I wish there were more) but I was able to find ones that work for me. I have a folder that I use for notes that I take in a CLE class, so I put an apple on that folder, which makes me think of school. I put scales of justice on two of my law-related folders. I put a happy face on my folder for family documents.
When you have a specific notebook open and you are taking notes, the interface is refreshed and makes better use of the top of the screen, even if you have multiple tabs open.
Faster selection of items
There are a number of new gestures in Goodnotes 6, but by far my favorite is the new selection gesture. I often write some notes, then realize that I want to go back and add something else above, so I need to move what I just wrote further down the page. In the past, I would select the lasso tool, then draw a circle around the text (or graphics or images or whatever), then use a finger to draft the contents in the lasso to a new location. In Goodnotes 6, you don’t have to switch from the pen tool to the lasso tool. Just draw a circle around whatever you want to select and then hold down one finger on the outline of the circle for about a second. The circle will change into a dotted line (just as if you had used the lasso tool to select) and you can move to a new location. You save a few steps, and thus you can get back to taking notes more quickly.
This is a great new feature that never even occurred to me as something that would be more efficient. Kudos to the designers for coming up with and implementing this one.
Scribble to erase
This feature is a great idea in theory, but I am having trouble using it in practice. The idea is that when you want to erase, instead of switching to the eraser tool or double-tapping the side of your Apple Pencil to switch to that tool, you simply use the same pen that you used to write to scratch out the word, or even part of a word, and what you scratched out disappears. This reminds me of a gesture used on the Apple Newton back in the 1990s.
I like the idea of erasing without taking the time to switch tools. But this feature has only worked about 20% of the time for me; the rest of the time, Goodnotes just adds my scribble on top of the word. Perhaps there is a trick to getting this feature to work more reliably, and hopefully I will get the knack of it soon. But for now, I’m just sticking with double-tapping my Apple Pencil to erase.
Spellcheck and autocomplete
This is certainly interesting, although I haven’t yet decided how useful it is. Goodnotes 6 now uses AI to look at what you are writing as you write so that it can let you know if there are spelling mistakes and so that it can offer to autocomplete a word. When it can offer help, Goodnotes puts red dots under a word. Tap the dots to see a pop-up list of suggestions.
When you suggest a word, Goodnotes will write the word and even attempt to mimic your own handwriting by looking at the handwriting that you used on the rest of the page. I don't think that it is a very close match to my own handwriting, but it is more than adequate to get the job done.
I virtually always take handwritten notes for my own use, not to share, so if I have a few typos in there, I don’t really care. But the fact that this feature works at all is pretty darn neat, and it may grow on me in the future.
Whenever I think about using AI to get work done, I always think about security. For example, I wouldn't want to share anything confidential with ChatGPT because anything that you type can become a part of its central knowledge base. But the developer of Goodnotes addresses this on its website, explaining that the AI respects your privacy: "AI handwriting features like Spellcheck and Word Complete that are based off our proprietary ML model are run entirely on device and the data is not sent anywhere so no one—including GoodNotes—can access it." That is reassuring.
…and many more
Those are the new features that jumped out at me, but there are many more. There are new tools for students who use Goodreader. There is a way to convert handwritten complicated math into typed math equations. Goodnotes can use AI to suggest additional sentences. The other new features don’t interest me as much as the ones I mentioned above, but I’m sure that others will find them quite useful.
Goodnotes is also doing more with its marketplace, where you can download notebook templates and stickers to add in your notes. I do have a handful of stickers that I created myself that I use frequently in my notes, so I do like the stickers feature, but I myself don't have much interest in downloading additional templates or stickers. But I do understand the appeal of adding stickers to notes to make them more interesting or easier to work with. I'm reminded of when I was in grade school and students would sometimes add stickers—or even cooler to me when I was younger, puffy stickers—to their notes. If you want to check out the marketplace, there are lots of free stickers and templates that you can download just to get a sense of how it works.
Other devices
I talk about using Goodnotes on my iPad because that is where I take my notes. But Goodnotes also works on the iPhone and the Mac. I often find it useful to pull up my notes on my iPhone when I am on the go, on when I am working on my Mac.
Cost
Upgrading to version 6 or paying for version 6 for the first time lets you use version 6 on the iPad, iPhone, and Mac.
The prior version, GoodNotes 5, cost $7.99. If you own GoodNotes 5 and you don’t want any of these new features, you can continue to use that app without paying anything more. If you want to upgrade, there is a discount based on how long ago you purchased the app.
If you are paying for the app for the first time, Goodnotes 6 costs either $9.99 a year or a one-time purchase of $29.99. The last big update was over four years ago in early 2019, so if it takes another four years to come out with Goodnotes 7, then the one-time purchase may be the cheaper way to go. But I opted for the $9.99 a year option because I like the idea of paying something to the developer every year considering that I use this app just about every day. If I end up paying slightly more this way, I have no problem with that.
Goodnotes 6 costs more than prior versions of the app, which were always a one-time purchase of less than $10. But if you want to take handwritten notes or use an Apple Pencil to annotate notes on PDF files, Goodnotes is such a fantastic app that the new price seems more than fair to me. I’ve loved using the app for over a decade, and I hope that I can continue to use the app and see more features added for at least another decade.
Conclusion
Whenever I am asked to name my favorite and most useful apps on my iPad, Goodnotes is always on the list. The new Goodnotes 6 adds some great new features, even if at least one of them—scribble to erase—doesn’t seem to be working well for me yet. Moreover, I love that the developers are starting to think about how AI can be used to make the app even more powerful.
Click here to get Goodnotes (free to download, subscribe to unlock all features).
