I Haven’t Used This App For The Longest Time Because Of Trust Issues
I refuse to engage with software that I cannot trust. I thought you made it clear that our relationship was honest and devoid of any nasty surprises. Personally, I will not use apps on a subscription based platform, and, yes, it seems recently that you understand this by providing what seems like a one-off purchase to address my concerns. However, the price of admission seems unreasonably high. Add to this the real possibility that new updates might make new, unreasonable demands. I hope you can see my dilemma. I think the only way I can continue to use this app with any level of confidence would be to have it completely separate from the app I originally purchased. If I can make suggestion, why not create a separate app called something like Goodnotes AI? Please note that my review wasn’t easy to write because I enjoyed using the app when it wasn’t integrated with the add-ons included in version 6.
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The Best App I’ve Seen, Can Still Go Farther
I’m very finicky when it comes to note taking apps; if even one feature I feel I need is missing I try to find a different one that better encompasses my needs. For several years, GoodNotes has been the strongest contender by a large marking! I love the mixture of tools, how easy it is to customize the tools and notebooks (not to mention how pretty they are), and something like adding a new page is made so seamless and intuitive! This is an edited review because, since my last review, they actually added a feature I asked for that involved editing the tools in the toolbar for a more customizable experience. Thank you so much GoodNotes team for adding this!!!
The only things I can think of for the developers to add is: 1) a “softness” slider for pen tools so handwriting comes out a little smoother, because I feel my writing on a paper is more often smoother and more legible than the direct translation onto a screen; and 2) a way to add integrated text boxes into a page format that tracks perfectly with the lines on the page (some notes are much better taken typed rather than handwritten, so it would be great to be able to do both with ease).
GoodNotes team, you’re doing great! You’ve got a great app on your hands, you’ve already implemented features that fans have wanted, so please keep doing what you’re doing and keep adding features to make your app the best on the market!
The only things I can think of for the developers to add is: 1) a “softness” slider for pen tools so handwriting comes out a little smoother, because I feel my writing on a paper is more often smoother and more legible than the direct translation onto a screen; and 2) a way to add integrated text boxes into a page format that tracks perfectly with the lines on the page (some notes are much better taken typed rather than handwritten, so it would be great to be able to do both with ease).
GoodNotes team, you’re doing great! You’ve got a great app on your hands, you’ve already implemented features that fans have wanted, so please keep doing what you’re doing and keep adding features to make your app the best on the market!
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Great App But Needs Updating
Overall, this is my preferred app when it comes to note-taking for college. I find it that it provides me with almost everything I need for note-taking with maybe a few things here and there that I require from other apps. One thing that I have noticed is that it lates quite a bit when it comes to writing or drawing multiple things on a page. This can get a bit annoying especially for note-taking for heavy concept classes like microbiology where I need to draw microbiological processes that usually requires multiple drawings, colors, written annotations, etc. the only way I have found to fix this is by going out of the notebook and going back in. Additionally, I think there needs to be a sensitivity adjuster for the scribble-to-erase feature. I have been finding it very annoying when it does not erase and leaves the scribble. I understand that some people do not like this feature but they are able to turn it off. However, for people like, me that need this feature to keep up with fast paced lectures, it gets annoying when it takes me multiple scribbles to erase and sometimes I just give up and use the regular eraser. I have found that if it does not erase with scribbles after about 4-5 times, it just completely stops working. These are the only current complaints that I have. Overall, I would definitely recommend this app to others who are looking for a well-balanced note-taking app for school work or general work.
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Usability problems on macos
Having been a power user of GN5 on both macos and iPadOS for several years now, the upgrade to GN6 essentially rendered the macos experience near useless.
In the earlier GN6 versions, there were memory leak issues that crashed the app nearly every 5 minutes (on Apple Silicon M1 and M1 Max machines), leading to the loss of several pieces of work. More recent updates seem to have targeted this issue, but now even on my M1 Max Mac Studio with 32GB of RAM, the display of notes is extremely glitchy: upon opening a notebook, pages are displayed as completely blank; only after about 5s the first page loads, and scrolling over several pages hence is restarting the rendering process (and wait time) again. This behavior is reproducible even with a notebook just containing 2-3 pages of handwritten notes. It feels like the developers took some sort of quick fix on macos to tackle the memory overflow problems of GN 6 on macos, but this is not acceptable, as in this present form the core functionality is impacted.
The reason I mention these problems in detail is that they simply did not occur in GN 5 on macos, where the experience was near flawless. In particular, even for notebooks with close to a hundred pages of handwritten notes, scrolling was fluid, and with no memory overflow problems. I therefore urge the developers to investigate and fix these issues, potentially by offering a dedicated macos app for the (nowadays standard) Apple Silicon platform.
In the earlier GN6 versions, there were memory leak issues that crashed the app nearly every 5 minutes (on Apple Silicon M1 and M1 Max machines), leading to the loss of several pieces of work. More recent updates seem to have targeted this issue, but now even on my M1 Max Mac Studio with 32GB of RAM, the display of notes is extremely glitchy: upon opening a notebook, pages are displayed as completely blank; only after about 5s the first page loads, and scrolling over several pages hence is restarting the rendering process (and wait time) again. This behavior is reproducible even with a notebook just containing 2-3 pages of handwritten notes. It feels like the developers took some sort of quick fix on macos to tackle the memory overflow problems of GN 6 on macos, but this is not acceptable, as in this present form the core functionality is impacted.
The reason I mention these problems in detail is that they simply did not occur in GN 5 on macos, where the experience was near flawless. In particular, even for notebooks with close to a hundred pages of handwritten notes, scrolling was fluid, and with no memory overflow problems. I therefore urge the developers to investigate and fix these issues, potentially by offering a dedicated macos app for the (nowadays standard) Apple Silicon platform.
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Disappointed
I paid for goodnotes a long time ago since my university years, recently i updated to goodnotes 6 and i no longer have unlimited edits eventho i have paid before. What have you done? Why why why, this is awful, now I won’t use goodnotes anymore. Very disappointed, i feel like i just got robbed
Newest paid version of the app is worse than the previous free one.
In this new paid version some features are improved, for example editing images, and adding/editing text is easier. However, the main reason I got this app was to use as a virtual notebook and every time I click off the app to check something on safari for example and then click back to write a note, it seems to load up the app again and this closes the current document I’m writing in. I then have to go through my files to open it again. I presume this is to update the note/upload to iCloud and there might be a way to stop it doing this. I have yet to find the answer and I am finding it increasingly annoying. I wish I hadn’t updated it or paid for it. When I did update it I had to pay to have access to my own documents, which I felt was absolutely absurd. They are my documents! Overall I must say goodnotes is fabulous and I couldn’t be without it. I just wish they never changed to a charged version, as I’m sure there are a number of restrictions in the free version now.
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Really disappointed 2023
Too many glitches! GN5 user for almost 4 years! Have recommended it to so many people, but GN6 you have tried to reinvent the wheel and it’s now like riding on square tyres….!
Main issues:
-select a file, good. Select a notebook, good. Select a page……opens a different one! Try again, still the wrong page. Stay with that page and then scroll right through the whole file till you find the page you wanted! Start working on your project and want to change zoom, nothing, so you pinch or slide slightly more and wham you might be lucky if it stops within 5-6 pages! Go back to trying to locate your page and be very careful to not do the same thing again because now it’s starting to take longer than the old paper version to do any task! Not what I wanted from a supposed better program/app.
Please see if you can rectify, or just add a couple of the new things(like the ruler! Brilliant!!) to the old GN5 and I would be happy.
Main issues:
-select a file, good. Select a notebook, good. Select a page……opens a different one! Try again, still the wrong page. Stay with that page and then scroll right through the whole file till you find the page you wanted! Start working on your project and want to change zoom, nothing, so you pinch or slide slightly more and wham you might be lucky if it stops within 5-6 pages! Go back to trying to locate your page and be very careful to not do the same thing again because now it’s starting to take longer than the old paper version to do any task! Not what I wanted from a supposed better program/app.
Please see if you can rectify, or just add a couple of the new things(like the ruler! Brilliant!!) to the old GN5 and I would be happy.
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Issues, Issues and more issues
I’ve been using this app since 2020 and I’ve recommended it to so many people who use iPads but now I think I’m going to stop. I don’t know what was done with the update but now my app crashes like nothing whenever I’m recording while taking notes. Please take note that I NEVER had this issue prior to the Goodnotes 6 launch. Now, every single time I record my notes, this app crashes midway making me lose my notes all the time. I already downgraded from Goodnotes 6 because it was happening even more frequently with Goodnotes 6 so I stuck with version 5 because why fix what was broken? But the same issue has persisted for months now. It hurts me to leave this bad review because I used to LOVE this app and I still use it for all my note-taking and so many other things—planning, presenting, you name it. But I cannot keep using something that time and time fails me because now I lose so much progress with all the notes I thought I’d kept recorded. I want to say that it’s my iPad but the same issue has also come up on my Mac when I record my notes. It really is frustrating because no matter how many times I update the app, the same issue occurs. I hate that now I have to find another alternative because I thought I found my forever app but I guess not. If this is a bug, I really hope it’s fixed soon because I don’t want to have to migrate but it seems like I will soon have no option.
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Great until it wasn’t
I have been using this app for the past three years to take notes for my university subjects. There was a one time payment to purchase the app and it worked great for what I needed.
But recently they have introduced a subscription option which I was not interested in (broke uni student). However with 1 week left in uni I was attempting to email a document (pdf) to the app, which I have always done, but the emails kept getting rejected.
I then noticed there was a new version of the app so I had to delete and reinstall the app to get the new version. Doing this I found out I could not longer email my pdf documents to the app and that these documents can’t be more than 5mb.
This is extremely unfair to people who have purchased the app years ago, but now need to pay to use it. 5mb and three documents is not enough or fair to people who can’t afford continuous payments and want the basic free plan. Let alone people who have already paid for the app.
The app is a great tool for studying and taking notes, as long as your willing to pay the price, of which I am not.
But recently they have introduced a subscription option which I was not interested in (broke uni student). However with 1 week left in uni I was attempting to email a document (pdf) to the app, which I have always done, but the emails kept getting rejected.
I then noticed there was a new version of the app so I had to delete and reinstall the app to get the new version. Doing this I found out I could not longer email my pdf documents to the app and that these documents can’t be more than 5mb.
This is extremely unfair to people who have purchased the app years ago, but now need to pay to use it. 5mb and three documents is not enough or fair to people who can’t afford continuous payments and want the basic free plan. Let alone people who have already paid for the app.
The app is a great tool for studying and taking notes, as long as your willing to pay the price, of which I am not.
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So close to perfect, just two changes would make it
I use this app so much for university and it’s perfect in every aspect bar two - I really want to be able to export to pdf without the cover page. I love the cover page for my Goodnotes organisation, but I can’t submit work with it. It means that I have to delete the cover page, export to pdf, and then re-add the cover page (which requires a few steps because understandably it’s not something the app developers expect to happen often).
My second, much more minor change, is the ability to lock a zoom level. I use an iPad mini 6, mostly horizontally, and I’d love the ability to lock my zoom level to just smaller than the full width of the screen (or any custom zoom really). Whether it’s the default when I rotate my iPad, or I had the options to select from preset/custom zoom levels that then lock in place I don’t mind, but I think both would make such amazing additions to an already near perfect app
My second, much more minor change, is the ability to lock a zoom level. I use an iPad mini 6, mostly horizontally, and I’d love the ability to lock my zoom level to just smaller than the full width of the screen (or any custom zoom really). Whether it’s the default when I rotate my iPad, or I had the options to select from preset/custom zoom levels that then lock in place I don’t mind, but I think both would make such amazing additions to an already near perfect app
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