Pros > Cons

For me the pros far outweigh the cons and this app has not only become my go-to app for pdf markup but also note-taking and bullet journaling. The inking is so great, it has inspired me to handwrite many things again, and thanks to the ability to search even handwriting, that comes with no limitations. That said, there are still areas that need improvement.

Pros:
- Inking: I love the inking and the zoom window. I find it to be very smooth and easy to write legibly. The auto-advance in the zoom window works great and I love how you can set page margins. Palm rejection when not using the zoom window seems to work fine, though I rarely use this, so see other reviews if this is important to you.
- Search of handwriting: Search of handwriting is amazing. It picks up on even some of my less legible words.
- Shape recognition: turn this on, draw a triangle, circle, square, line, etc and it will recognize the shape and make the lines smooth. Great for diagramming!

Cons:
- iCloud sync: iCloud sync needs some serious work. It takes a long time to sync and I have to leave the category and come back for it to show if the notebook is updated. I dont trust it at all and it doesnt seem to sync in the background. (using iOS 9.3.1)
- Search for document: While handwriting search rocks, it doesnt extend to search for particular documents (e.g. finding a notebook that contains notes on a particular topic); This makes it harder to manage large libraries of notebooks and find what youre looking for. Notability does a much better job on this front.
- Annotations: One feature I like in Notability is you can open a document and have it filter the thumbnails of pages to show only those you have annotated. This makes it easy to review key pages in the document. Goodnotes would benefit from something like this.
- Rearranging multiple pages: If you decide to shuffle the pages in a notebook and need to move several pages to a new area, I havent found a way to do this without moving one page at a time. The thumbnail view lets you select multiple pages and copy to the clipboard, but then theres no paste function (its possible Im missing something; if so, perhaps it needs to be more intuitive).

All-in-all, this is a great note-taking, handwriting app. I can even use my iPhone 5S as a memo pad with ease. Id make this 4 stars if the iCloud sync was improved. It would get to 5 with more robust document management features. Keep up the good work folks!

3817md about GoodNotes 4