Time Base Technology | $10 (£10) yearly
- Crisp interface design with lots of formatting options
- Particularly well suited to Apple Pencil and iPad users
- New AI features are a mixed bag
We last covered GoodNotes when it hit version 5.0 way back in 2019. Now that five years have passed, and with version 6.5 adding some interesting iOS 18-inflected ingredients, we felt it was time to revisit one of the most well-established note-taking apps. Is it still noteworthy?
You can check out our previous review for the nuts and bolts of GoodNotes, which largely remain the same in version 6.5. The TL;DR of it is that this is a smart and refined digital note-taking and management app that lets you create a varied range of formatted notebooks.
There’s a huge range of Notebook formats
That remains the case in version 6.5, albeit with a refined UI. It continues to be an experience that feels native to the iPad with an Apple Pencil. It’s quite possible to type or even scrawl your notes on an iPhone too, but it’s far from the most intuitive notes app for quickly getting your thoughts down in this way.
Conversely, the developer has made it easier than ever to adjust, reflow and resize handwritten notes using the powerful lasso tool.
You can change the tone of your notes using AI
Version 6 added the ability to use AI to suggest edits to your notes, whether that’s spelling and grammar, changing the tone to something more professional (or jovial), or even lengthening or shortening the text. The results were rather hit and miss in my testing. The AI assistant successfully made my notes more professional-sounding, but lengthening them did nothing and shortening them flat out broke some of the grammar.
The experimental Word Complete feature is also neat, offering suggestions while you’re typing or even writing your notes. In the latter case, the app’s attempts to replicate my handwriting weren’t particularly convincing, and the speed at which it supplied suggestions wasn’t quite snappy enough to be useful, but hopefully both will improve over time, as is often the way with AI.
Word Complete can predict and autocomplete your notes
Math Assistance seems to capitalise on iOS 18’s new features as seen in the new iPad Calculator app. With this feature you can apparently scrawl out sums and have them checked and solved, though this only works with courses bought and downloaded from the internal app Marketplace. It won’t simply react this way when you’re scrawling down sums in a generic note, which is a shame.
According to the release notes for version 6.5, there’s also supposed to be an AI feature called Ask Goodnotes that lets you issue prompts through a chat window within a note, but I have yet to encounter a way to activate this feature.
You can type notes, but that’s not really the point here
All in all, GoodNotes 6.5 remains one of the best note taking apps for anyone with an iPad and an Apple Pencil. Its more recent AI-based additions, however, still seem to be a work in progress.