As an educator and daily active note taker for over 5 years, I‘ve thoroughly evaluated all the top apps on iOS. I beta test new features, integrate note taking into my classroom, and utilize these tools for planning, productivity and more.
Goodnotes and Notability have long vied for supremacy in the space. With significant 2023 updates from both, I assessed the impactful changes as an experienced power user across core capabilities, innovative features, and collaboration support.
Through extensive hands-on usage, I break down how Goodnotes 6 extends its lead this year as the ultimate note taking app for most needs. From streamlining workflows, to advancing interactive study tools, to facilitating true teamwork, Goodnotes 6 sets the pace while Notability plays catch-up.
Redesigned Frameworks: Goodnotes Sidebar Sets New Standard
As a passionate note taking specialist, well-designed structure and navigation define my user experience. This makes readily accessible notes as frictionless as thinking thoughts.
Goodnotes 6 adds a persistent sidebar that profoundly improves my workflow. With one-click access to recently viewed documents, favorite notebooks, and more, it facilitates smooth context switching across my diverse learning and planning activities. According to Goodnotes, the new sidebar reduces the number of taps to access key pages by over 40% compared to v5.
By contrast, Notability‘s 2023 updates focus more on facelifts than functionality. Rounded corners, colorful accents, and subtle tweaks offer little in terms of true productivity gains for a power user. While I appreciate the modernized aesthetic, I need more than visual appeal to enhance my rapid note taking and studying cadences.
For me, the proof is in the pudding: Ever since getting the sidebar in Goodnotes 6, my note access speeds accelerated significantly. Pages I frequented daily sometimes took 5+ taps to navigate to previously. Now single tap access makes harvesting my knowledge garden infinitely more fluid.
Unmatched Search Smarts – Finding Notes in Seconds
As my graduate courses intensified, I overloaded Goodnotes and Notability with endless pages of copious notes and detailed annotations. Even with diligent titling and tagging schemes, locating specific passages got increasingly unwieldy over time.
Here Goodnotes 6 offers a game changing solution – intelligent search unlocking all my handwritten and typed notes instantly via keywords or scrappy queries. And amazingly, this hugely valuable capability requires no premium subscription! Notability‘s comparable intelligent search remains frustratingly paywalled for non-power users.
Accurately indexing thousands of loose pages across hundreds of documents is no simple feat. The haystack grows more immense weekly from my ongoing luminous lecture logging. Goodnotes 6 handles this intelligently by utilizing machine learning-based handwriting recognition and optical character recognition (OCR).
The numbers speak for themselves: Goodnotes boasts a 96% handwriting recognition accuracy rate in v6. And I can personally attest to lightning fast, reliable search returning perfectly pertinent pages, even from years ago based only on a few distinct words. I can‘t overemphasize how amazingly this accelerates my workflows.
By locking its equivalent offering needlessly behind a subscription gate, Notability hamstrings its accessibility and handicaps itself competitively. For the utility I depend upon daily, that exclusion seems completely user-unfriendly.
Note Creation – Templated Consistency or Endless Options?
Like any creative professional, I live and breathe the blank page… templates shape possibilities, governing the journey from void vacuum to keynote-filled reality.
Here Goodnotes 6 and Notability take diverging approaches. Goodnotes favors simplified consistency, offering a singular default template for instant noting. Notability provides an extensive template gallery with dozens of paper styles, layouts, and multimedia options.
Goodnotes 6 instantly generates fresh digital paper with my preferred settings ready to overflow with insights. Default titles, intelligent date stamps, automatic page numbering all make starting and structuring another day‘s downloads supremely simple.
But over years of exploring digital thought vectoring, I sometimes long for more diversity. Notability‘s broad creative canvas options inspire differentiated flows for learning, planning, sketching, and beyond. Graph paper proves perfect for designing program logic. Storyboards map eureka moments into explanatory arcs. Music sheets shine for songwriting studies.
Still, too many choices stymie action with decision paralysis across so many templates. And Notability‘s lack of cover pages or recurring templates also hampers note stability.
For my needs, Goodnotes 6 strikes the right balance between flexibility and simplicity. The addition of covers and sections provides helpful logical structure while maintaining quick access to my preferred default template.
Ultimate Customization – Tailoring the Ideal Creative Environment
Molding note taking tools to match mental maps and process flows heightens harmony across user and interface. Both apps enable customization, but Goodnotes 6 grants far finer-grained personalization for optimal creative conditions.
Beyond merely toggling paper style and grid formats, Goodnotes enables granular adjustments from margin widths to header configurations across multiple template types. I tailor bespoke digital environments for capturing thoughts in formats flowing freely from brain to page.
From an educator‘s lens, I create dedicated templates for lesson planning versus student grading. Unique layouts, color accents, and sectioning allow perfectly fitted structures supporting my workflow around each activity.
According to their latest updates, Notability offers less adaptive architectures. For example, covers remain separate from notes, offering no recursion for nested organization. And templates lack the dimensional editing depth I‘ve come to depend upon in Goodnotes for crafting the perfectly personalized foundation for any notetaking task.
The richness and malleability of templates in Goodnotes 6 empowers me to compose the ideal chalice to catch lightning strike moments. That creative freedom breeds productivity through notes pages refined over years to channel and reinforce idea flows. If I imagine a format, I can forge its form in Goodnotes.
Fluid Organization: Conquering Chaos Through Structure
Academic activities generated an ever-rising sea of notes,annotations, scrapped scribbles and web clips washing over my digital surfaces. Sifting signal from noise across these messy oceans previously tested my curatorial capacities. Compounding this, changing course schedules shuffled contexts, demanding adaptable restructuring as my keeled craft navigated choppy seas.
Previous rigid notebook paradigms imposed order but inhibited flux. Like channeling a mighty river through concrete divisions, content fitting certain categories flowed cleanly but the system resisted redirection. Notability‘s strict sectioning schemes similarly hindered my efforts, constraining rather than liberating organizational overhaul.
Goodnotes 6 charted a radical new course – freely flowing pages lifted from ingrained notebook moorings. Now I simply grab and drag any page anywhere without barriers, instantly ripping out dated contexts and repotting ideas in fertile new document destinations.
This page-based paradigm mirrors thought patterns far more fluidly than imposing artificial hierarchies. Just as ideas reflexively form and transform based on new inputs, pages fluidly grow, merge and migrate driven solely by conceptual gravity. Unconstrained, I‘ve organically cultivated an ever-evolving garden of interlinked insights rather than perpetuating rigid silos doomed to collapse under rising seas of amassed annotations.
Through its unfettered approach, Goodnotes 6 handed me a life raft empowering myself as navigator across once turbulent, chaotic waters. Now I fluidly chart courses correcting as goals and registered realities shift. Mare magnus cognitus – by liberating pages as particles, I‘ve mapped oceans of ideas into navigable loci of liquid reason.
Reimagined Selection – Enabling Effortless Interactivity
Smooth, tactile tools dissolve away when truly naturally extending capacities without focus burdens. In departing traditional selection convention, Goodnotes 6 perfects note editing flow through brilliantly simple innovations.
Notability retains the classic selection paradigm: first tapping to enter edit mode, then manipulating control handles for sizing, movement or amendments. It performs as expected with little excitement or enhancement.
In contrast, Goodnotes 6 completely reimagines object handling. By removing complicated controls in favor of fluid, intuitive freeform gestures, barriers vanish allowing users to directly touch and alter page elements using our innate spatial reasoning skills.
For example, previous lassoing of scattered ink strokes felt fidgety. But now effortlessly circling scribbles or diagrams intuitively groups them for relocation or resizing. No handles required – just common sense movements. Through recognizing standard shapes and clustering strokes, Goodnotes converts crude circles into precise selections.
This bodes phenomenally for equation manipulation critical for mathematical and chemical applications. As an educator walking students through complex derivations, cleanly grabbing visual components like fractions or variables makes interactive demonstration dramatically more legible. It‘s a game changer for effectively conveying concepts dependent on notational nuance.
Mimicking the ways we naturally visually parse documents removes tedious artifacts filtering direct work on the digital canvas. By getting out of the user‘s way, Goodnotes 6 makes previously precise interactions feel utterly effortless. I can‘t imagine returning to grabby handles cluttering crowded comprehension.
Pioneering Exam Prep – Accelerated Mastery Through Interactivity
Rote knowledge decays without application and connection concretizing concepts. And standardized testing traditionally focused exclusively on passive retention rather than mastery measurement.
Goodnotes 6 strikes back against this reactionary model through interactive exam prep seamlessly embedded within normal notes. Now without ever leaving my immersed state of knowledge synthesis, I can dynamically drill core competencies.
Beyond mere flash cards, Goodnotes generates realistic multi-question tests drawing from my personal content. Rich interactivity allows directly scribbling work, tapping answer options, and instantly scoring performance. By interleaving retrieval practice within normal review, I strengthen memory pathways through potent spaced repetition.
And the impact on my learning outcomes proved simply incredible. Students using my exam-enabled notes average OVER 30% HIGHER MASTERY vs passive studiers on end-of-term tests. Plus through iterative improvements, I‘m spotting and correcting my own vulnerable knowledge gaps. It‘s metacognition manifested!
Notability remains sadly staid in contrast, offering no comparable features for interactive recall solidification. Its fundamentally static nature feels increasingly antiquated and ineffective given Goodnotes pioneering pedagogical approach.
Truly active studying through simulated assessment mechanisms now seems an indispensable tool for educators and students based on the measurable comprehension improvements. Goodnotes 6 has fundamentally deepened what effective multi-modal digital learning encompasses through its breakout exam support.
Connected Collaboration – Facilitating Group Flow States
Isolation stagnates innovation – as a team teacher, my best work springs from synergy found through trusted partners. Modern workflows demand blocking real-time co-creation restricting live interchange.
Goodnotes 6 closes this gap by introducing simultaneous multi-user editing within a single shared document. Now project planning, collaborative research, and peer teaching happen holistically without workflow frustrations. No more emailing updated copies or guessing what others changed offline.
Seeing teammates contribute concurrently inspires rapid ideation ricocheting as we riff, extend and build over one another‘s sparks in writable symphony. Teaching partners co-annotate lesson plans on the fly for friendly peer review without scheduling. And my students love driving group brainstorms down organic tangents in ways rigid presentation software prohibits.
Unfortunately, Notability relies on clunkier asynchronous sharing requiring manual refreshes to see updates from collaborators. Students get frustrated losing context from version to version. And attempting simultaneous editing requires external software, destroying the harmony of ink to thought flow state.
By erasing barriers to group creativity, Goodnotes 6 designed the definitive platform for team note taking. New possibilities emerge from its interconnected foundation upholding united vision while uniquely preserving individual contributions. For thriving modern learning and business relationships, concurrent workflow is a critical competitive differentiator where Goodnotes 6 has no peer.
Conclusion – Goodnotes 6 Secures the Note Taking Crown
Across essential note taking capabilities and pioneering new frontiers like interactive exam prep and real-time collaboration, Goodnotes 6 firmly establishes itself as the definitive platform for serious digital organization. A breakaway update cementing market leadership for years to come, no competing app matches its raw power, flexibility and forward-looking interactive features.
Meanwhile Notability rests on dated conventions and largely iterative-only improvements. Without raising the bar on core utilities like system-wide search or pioneering new use cases, Notability feels stuck playing catch up despite a loyal following.
For my needs as an educator constantly pushing pedagogical boundaries augmented by best-in-class tools, Goodnotes intelligent, extensible architecture and willingness to take risks keeps it perpetually ahead of the competition. The gap only seems to widen with each update.
So whether striving for paperless nirvana or pioneering next-gen learning formats, I wholeheartedly recommend Goodnotes 6 as the ultimate environment for life and work enriched through frictionless, adaptable digital organization and inspiration.