This Is a Reading App That Allows You to Highlight and Take Notes
There’s a world of read-later apps, and there’s also a world of note-taking apps. And coincidences are rare. Follow-up reading apps are usually fairly simple in design, and if you need features like text highlighting, it will often cost an extra $10 per month ( Matter and Readwise Reader are notable examples). On the other hand, there are full-fledged note-taking apps with tons of features (like Obsidian or Notion ), perhaps more than the average person would ever need.
GoodLinks finds a middle ground. This is a specially designed reading and link collecting application for Mac, iPhone and iPad. It syncs securely with iCloud and can easily add and display articles from anywhere. But the best part is that it comes with handy research tools usually reserved for note-taking apps.
Highlight and take notes online
It’s surprisingly difficult to find a reliable tool for highlighting web articles (no, Chrome extensions don’t help much). That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see how simple and easy highlighting works in the GoodLinks app. It’s similar to using Apple Books or Kindle.
On a Mac, highlight the text, right-click, select Highlight , and the app will automatically apply the default highlight color. If you want, you can right-click again to change the color. On an iPhone or iPad, select the text and use the Highlight option in the pop-up menu. You can click on the text again to change the color. To change the default color, go to Settings > Highlights > Default Color .
There are also contextual notes. You can add notes to a selection or any selected text. Any text you add a note to will be highlighted automatically. On a Mac, Add a Note is in the context menu, and on iPhone, it’s in the pop-up context menu.
Here, simply enter whatever you want and GoodLinks will save it with the highlighted text.
GoodLinks has a very nice design detail in the scroll bar. It shows little colored marks that correspond to your highlights, as well as the color of your highlights. This makes it easy to follow along or quickly jump to a highlighted point simply by using the scroll bar. On a Mac, you can also click on the highlight in the sidebar, while on iPhone you can simply click on the label. You can even add a widget that displays your latest highlights on your iPhone’s home screen.
Share and export notes
Highlighting tools are most useful when they allow you to share your work. This is where GoodLinks excels.
By default, you can share all your highlights and notes in a single Markdown file. The file will contain the article title, URL, highlights, and all your notes in one place. On a Mac, choose File > Export Highlights . On iPhone, the export function is located inside the three-dot menu button in the toolbar.
To simply share individual moments, right-click any snippet (or note) to share it directly with any app (there’s good integration with the Notes app). You can simply copy it as plain text.
GoodLinks Experience
GoodLinks offers something other reading tools don’t, and as a bonus, it’s not reliant on the Internet.
GoodLinks also differs in pricing. The app purchase price for all Apple platforms is $9.99. The highlighting and note-taking features are part of GoodLinks Premium, which is not a subscription. Paying $4.99 will give you access to all new features released for one year. If you cancel payments, you will retain features released during the payment year.