Farah Afifa: GOODNOTES 5 [DIGITAL NOTETAKING APP]

Hi everyone, semester is starting soon for me and I would like to share a helpful application for everyone specifically for students. My current favorite app on my iPad would be GoodNotes 5 as for taking handwritten notes. I will share few points that you can consider before purchasing the app.

LAUNCH SCREEN

With GoodNotes, you can create documents and notebooks which I would say very helpful in organizing your notes. You can even create your own favorite list from the documents or the notebooks itselves.

SEARCH FUNCTION

This function can be used from “Documents” and you will get results from your notebook titles, written notes, typed notes, and any PDFs. You’re presented with a thumbnail of each notebook and any pages that contain your search. Just tapping on it will bring you to that page where any instances of the search term are highlighted. Along the bottom of the page you’ll be able to cycle through the pages in the document containing your search term.

CUSTOMIZING YOUR NOTEBOOKS

I'm the person who usually consider 3 things when I purchase notebooks. The design of the cover page, the layout of the sheets and it must be practical (having pockets, division of the notebooks etc.)

For GoodNotes, you can choose your own cover page. They have several designs and themes. You can draw/ design it yourself too. First requirement fulfilled for me.

Next, layout of the sheets. GoodNotes includes several categories of paper:

“Essentials”: standard blank, dotted, squared, ruled narrow and ruled wide sheet
“Writing Papers”: eight varieties of columned paper including Cornell, single, two and three column layouts
“Planner”: basic layouts for accounting, to-do lists, monthly, and weekly layouts

Additionally, you can choose the size of the notebooks as well. It supports many page sizes (A7-A3, GoodNotes Standard, Letter and Tabloid) and plenty of paper templates. Your pages can either be in portrait or landscape mode.

VARIOUS PENS + HIGHLIGHTER

GoodNotes has 3 types of pens you can choose from which are fountain pen, ball pen and brush pen. I rarely use ball pen hehe. Physically, I loveeeeeeeeeee to buy pens. All those colorful pens and different types of it. Using GoodNotes, sure it save my money but it's worth it because my notes still looks like how I would do it traditionally instead of digitally.

You can adjust the stroke width as well according to your preference.

If you don't like to see handwritten notes, you can always add text. Especially when you just need to paste words from other materials.

Like the pen, you can create custom colors and adjust the size of the highlighter. You can also access your three favorites from the toolbar. You can constrain the highlighter in GoodNotes to draw in straight lines. You don't have to worry about not highlighting it in a straight line anymore.

Also, creating shapes. You just need to click on the shape button and draw whatever shape you need. GoodNotes has a smart shape feature to draw shapes that convert to clean shapes.

ADDING IMAGE TO YOUR NOTES

GoodNotes offers a direct access when placing photos from your library but you can just drag an image from the Internet or your lecture slides to your notebooks.

Overall, this app deserves 5 stars for its functions.