MEET THE DEVELOPER
A love letter to handwritten notes
Goodnotes 6
Notes Reimagined
GoodNotes makes notetaking a seamless experience on your iPhone and iPad, with the added convenience of digital organisation. Try it for free now.
In his last year of university, Steven Chan wasn’t spending every waking hour with his head buried in textbooks like many students. Instead, he was making an app.
“I knew I wouldn’t find many jobs with a maths degree,” Chan says. “This was my last chance before graduation. So I chose the easiest classes, skipped all the lectures and focused on building my app.”
GoodNotes was inspired in part by his maths studies. Formulas and symbols are fiddly to type, so Chan took handwritten notes in class. But paper notes were messy.
Then iPad came out and Chan wanted to switch to handwriting digitally. The problem was he couldn’t find a writing app he liked, so he decided to forego his coursework and focus on developing one.
If you don’t get the writing experience right, people will just go back to pen and paper.
– Steven Chan, founder of GoodNotes
But that didn’t mean Chan forgot everything he’d studied: the app’s exclusive vector ink engine meticulously recreates the fluid and natural feel of writing on paper.
“I bought a lot of traditional fountain pens to compare the results,” Chan says. “I also bought a Moleskine notebook to put next to my iPad to try to match the paper colour. If you don’t get the writing experience right, people will just go back to pen and paper.”
Launched in 2011, GoodNotes has proved so popular that Chan has worked for himself ever since. “Some users send us ‘love notes’,” he says. “One of them said his father was in hospital and couldn’t speak. They used GoodNotes to communicate. It was touching to read.”
Chan worked on GoodNotes on his own for five years until the release of Apple Pencil inspired him to expand the app – so he put together a team to do it.
Product designer Rodney Chow says that GoodNotes 5 took two years to come together: “People liked GoodNotes 4 very much, so there were high expectations. The UI was our biggest challenge, because we wanted the experience to be intuitive.”
By popular demand, GoodNotes 5 added a powerful global search that enables users to find the notes they want with a single word.
With the app’s full version – which you can access for a one-time fee – you’ll unlock the handwriting recognition function, which converts handwritten notes into text so you can edit and share with ease. The full version also comes with the Lasso Tool, which makes cutting and pasting easy, and an unlimited number of subfolders, helping you to organise your notes in any way you want.
There are a few questions that often come up: how to search easier, how to manage documents better and how to study better. Looking far ahead, we’re also thinking about how to collaborate better.
– Rodney Chow, product designer
Moving between GoodNotes on macOS and iOS feels seamless, too. “The two apps go hand in hand; they’re like companions who help you be more creative,” Chow points out.
Try GoodNotes now to conveniently write notes across your iOS, iPadOS and macOS devices and capture your ideas right when inspiration strikes.