Best Note App for Studying
Pros: Ideal for studying as you can create folders and categories within folders and categories. Colour coding is an added bonus. Ability to write to text is a fun function but still needs work to really work seamlessly. Cons: Handwriting just isn’t as nice as the native Notes app. It is over sensitive, creating extra lines/flicks in my letters ruining the neatness of the handwriting. And no adjusting the sensitivity does not help. No smooth way of moving to the next bullet point while handwriting (it is meant to be a light tap but you end up tapping out of the text box and when you try to tap back in you’ve moved onto to the next line). Missing the ability to create simple tables like on Microsoft Word. Unable to create sub-bullet points in my notes which is a little annoying. In spite of all this, Goodnotes is still the best notetaking app out there for studying. Hopefully they will make some fixes in the future.
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Lots of bugs
I use this app for university. At first, it was really great however, upon using it more I’ve come across a lot of bugs. The handwriting feature is good, so little complaints about that. But, the typing tools are full of glitches. I understand that it is a handwriting app and that is the main focus, however I enjoy including both into my notes. First of all, the colour-saving feature for typing does not work, I’ve tried to reset it and manually change the colours but it just will not let me save a text colour! The typing constantly glitches, not letting you delete text, or crashing the app, or putting the typing bar behind the words so you can’t type a sentence, not allowing me to delete or change text I’ve already written, changing the colour of my text randomly mid-sentence, overlapping my texts randomly…the list goes on. It is very frustrating, and makes my note-taking so much slower. It is a shame, because the rest of the app has some really great features and I love how the app’s layout and accessibility, but the typing feature requires some serious amending and updates. Also, it would be nice to have some more fonts for the typing feature, as Helvetica is kinda boring…The amount of bugs and errors in the typing feature makes it hard to justify the money spent on it. Please fix these asap!
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A bit of kinks here and there but overall a good study app!
I love this app, it helps me to study! But, there are some things i'd like to see improved on it. I found that while working on some notes i'd get to the bottom of the page and when it would tell me to make a new page I would add one. However, there would be times when I'd add a new page in between already made notes (if by accident or just because i'd think i'd need the extra page), that when i'd delete the page (even if im currently selected on it), it would instead delete the ones with the already completed page of notes and I can't recover the page anymore, so i'd have to retype everything. There would also be times when the computer would add in already typed out words when it's trying to actively predict your word (e.g. I would type the word "paragraph" and while i'm typing out "paragr-" it would type out "paragrparagraph" or double the word "paragraph paragraph." I also noticed on the flashcards that you can only choose between text,picture, or written/drawing. sometimes my professor would have the pictures that are too big to capture with both the picture and questions in them. When trying to put pictures into the study cards I was disappointed knowing I can't really add in a text with the pictures that doesn't have questions such as putting "Find the amygdala in the picture". Aside from these hiccups that needs to be improved on, I think this app is a very good app.
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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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