GoodNotes is the Note System we Need right now

We all know I’m a big fan of reMarkable; no questions there. Here’s the thing, though, Sometimes you want to be able to look at documents in a slightly more interactive manner. Or you want to be able to see your documents in colour. I know that I certainly do. Sometimes the documents I get have colour-coded charts or things that, while I can see in black and white, the graphics look MUCH better in colour. Last year, I went to a good friend who I knew dealt with his documents entirely on his iPad and asked what he used. His answer was GoodNotes.

QUICK LEGAL MUMBOJUMBO!!!!! I am not in any way affiliated with GoodNotes. I have used this product and found it quite helpful, but if you decide to go and get one based on this blog post, I get nothing from it (other than the satisfaction of knowing I helped make your decision for you). Are we all good? Great…ON WITH THE POST!

GoodNotes (if you go and look on the App Store or the Play Store) is one of many different similar products that are available today. If you were looking for a decent PDF reader/editor, it is a bit of a case of trying to see the forest from the trees. Having used GoodNotes for a few months now, I would like to go through a few key aspects that I like about this product.

1) You can put your hand down – In the old days (say 5-7 years ago as of this posting), most of the PDF read/write programs you could find for your iPad were not fantastic. Yes, you could load your documents on and read through them and write on them, but the touch technology was not developed enough to know the difference between your hand and your stylus. This meant that you had to hover your arm over the iPad to do anything, which aside from being uncomfortable, was just plain annoying. GoodNotes is the first program that I’ve experienced that you can rest your hand on the device to make those handwritten notes you want to make on your document. I’m so happy that the touch technology has come along enough to give a regular handwritten experience.

REALLY easy system to understand – Oh my goodness! There are so many different programs that I’ve used were to use all the features you need to pay for a service or sign up for a thing and set up passwords etc…..Sometimes, it’s just easier to load it onto a program and have the thing work. This is the case with Goodnotes. It’s not a complex system; it does not require any fancy sign-up features or multiple e-mails for things. You download the App to your phone, tablet or computer, and then you can start loading documents and start working on them.

The App is highly functional (Transitions from e-mail) – Something that I like is that if you have the App on your phone, and you get a document you want to work on, you can set up a copy to go to GoodNotes, and when you open your tablet, the document appears there. Similarly, if you load the document you want to make notes on from your computer, once you reach over and grab your tablet, the document will be there for you to work on. The easy back and forth transition functionality make using GoodNotes a snap. I also like to build a folder structure within GoodNotes to store older PDFs that you don’t need to see upfront anymore. This means that you can set up a filing structure that will let you easily reference documents should you need them later on. I can see one use for this is for Students doing research projects to separate documents for a particular paper and go back to those specifically later for reference.

I really like GoodNotes. I have used a bunch of PDF programs that say that they are easy to use and sync with their various iterations (Mobile, tablet, computer) but end up being challenging to use, or don’t sync properly, or both. It’s essential to me (as it should be to you) to have a single program that works across all of your platforms. Partially it’s because it’s MUCH easier to rely on one program that will look the same and act the same. Also, if you need to have three different programs for each of your devices, you will have to spend nearly as much time transitioning between programs and devices as you would working on the actual document. Working on the document is a critical issue, so having to worry about what the program does is just a waste of time. GoodNotes cuts out the noise by being available and the same everywhere you go to access it.

What Pdf program do you use? Would you consider switching?

Let me know in the comments section below. If you like this blog post and want to see more, you can follow me on Social Media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @jasonlovefiles) or Subscribe to my blog to get new content delivered directly to your mailbox.