I find that adding and moving pictures is easier in the MAC version and I therefore find myself switching back and forth between the MAC and the iOS versions, which pretty much is fine for me.

GoodNotes is a terrific app for handwritten notes. I often need a combination of diagrams, text, and plain old doodles for meeting notes. The advantage of GoodNotes has always been its excellent handwriting recognition and export. But, I've switched to Notability since a recent update that adds handwriting recognition on top of Notability’s other more refined features. Handwriting The ink system in GoodNotes is subtly better than Notability.

It feels a bit smoother and more realistic to me. But the difference is slight and in my use not important enough to ignore the other application differences. There are plenty of ink variations in Notability for my needs. I try to avoid using too many colors and almost always use the same line thickness. Text and More While I love handwriting in GoodNotes it always felt a bit awkward to type text.

Notability makes it a lot more natural to jump between the two modes and provides some additional formatting options that actually keep me typing longer. As with the ink, there are limited text formatting options in Notability but what’s there is easily accessible and covers most of what I want to do. Notability also adds an option to create three favorite formats to quickly apply to text. The same features exist on the iPhone and the Mac but the favorites do not sync, which is a bit of let down. Still, the simplicity of having just three favorites is exactly how I work with text formatting in my notes.

I don’t want to fiddle, I just want to call attention to some text or create an informative divider in a section. Simple formatting is the least of what I like about text in Notability. The support for outlines and checklist is excellent and something that is one of the main selling point over GoodNotes. On any of the supported Notability platforms, just select some text and set the format to checklist. Tapping an item crosses it off the list. Tab indents new items and they even support formatted text within checklists. Number outlines are also well supported in Notability.

I find these particularly useful for meeting agendas. I add annotations with the handwriting ink around the outline and later export the entire thing to my note archive in DEVONthink. There’s a curious option when working with date text in Notability. After typing a date string, it becomes underlined. Tapping or clicking the date reveals surprisingly useful options.

I’d love to see Notability expand on these options to link between dates and calendar events or even allow me to change the date with a calendar picker instead of typing. Organization and Search A major difference between Notability and GoodNotes (and many other iOS note apps) is Notability’s global search and three level document organization. Through a combination of folders and dividers I can create a moderately useful note organization. I use “dividers” to separate three top level categories of notes: Home, Work, and Scratch (a.k.a. Inside each divider I have “groups” that hold notes in Notability. I use groups like projects. Groups can have a user selected highlight color as well as an optional passcode.

None of this matters too much because I don’t use Notability for long term storage and Notability supports global search across all documents. This means I keep running documents in Notability but if I ever need to quickly jump to a location in a given note, I can use search. Search in Notability is somewhat basic but it has 90% of what I want, including search of handwriting recognition text, search of indexed PDFs, and hit highlighting across documents. Multi-Document View and Markup Notability now also supports multi-document view. Microsoft access for apple. It’s like split-screen but within the Notability window. This makes working with a reference document (like a PDF) and notes a very nice improvement over using a separate PDF viewer with the iOS split screen mode. GoodNotes and Notability are comparable PDF annotation tools and both are inferior to a dedicated app like.

The markup options are limited to the standard ink tools like drawing and highlights. However, the annotation index is helpful and bookmarking is easy. My biggest complaint about PDF annotation in Notability is that the “Stickies” are not true PDF annotations.