GoodNotes 5 is a popular iPad note-taking app.
It allows you to write and draw on “digital paper” with your fingers or the Apple Pencil.
How does an app seemingly designed for a tablet translate to a computer?
And do the iPad and Mac versions work well together?
We decided to answer these questions ourselves and had some ultimately disappointing results.
How bad was it?
Read on to find out!
We were off to a good start.
Learning that the free version of the app only came with three notebooks wasn’t an immediate turn-off.
Seeing the page templates available in the notebooks was also kind of exciting.
The user interface is pretty intuitive here too, and easy to figure out without a tutorial.
The default note-taking tool was set as the pen toola tool designed for writing notes out by hand.
How do you write out notes by hand on a MacBook?
Neither of which went very well for us.
But writing on a graphics tablet is less intuitive than writing directly on an iPad’s screen.
Even Notes or Text Edit offer better typing options!
So as a Mac-only note-taking app, it’s a hard pass for us.
What About Editing PDFs in GoodNotes for Mac?
Annotating PDFs went fairly well in GoodNotes for Mac.
Granted, paying for GoodNotes gets you the full app on your iPad, iPhone, and Mac.
But we wouldn’t recommend paying if you plan to only use the app on your Mac.
Let’s find out.
The more writing or drawing, the longer the synchronization took.
Despite this synchronicity, though, we found using the two apps at once wasn’t particularly useful.
In the end, it was easier just to use the iPad version for everything.
This ended up not being possible.
So perhaps only the Mac app is limited.
But for a lot of note-taking, it’d just be easier to use one equipment.
The Mac version of GoodNotes is just the iPad app slapped onto a computer.
And it just doesn’t work.
