#GOODNOTES DESKTOP UPDATE#

If GoodNotesвЂ™ team (or Apple, via API improvements) can cut down on the lag between changes syncing among collaborators, and can offer a native way to know who made which changes, collaboration could become a key differentiator for the app. The limitations arenвЂ™t great, but my hope is that todayвЂ™s release should be considered more a 1.0 of collaboration rather than the final version. Finally, itвЂ™s also worth noting that collaboration features currently donвЂ™t work for managed Apple IDs, such as those commonly employed in schools.Д¬ollaboration is such an important feature in 2020, and AppleвЂ™s current APIs for iCloud collaboration have been adopted by so few apps, that itвЂ™s always nice to see a new one add it. Hopefully this drawback will be resolved in a future update. What this means is that if you want to know who is responsible for certain notes or changes, youвЂ™ll need to coordinate with collaborators ahead of time and ask them to use specific colors so you know who is who, or else everyone will need to find a different identifying method such as initialing every annotation. Unlike an app like Apple Notes, where you can choose to highlight the text written by each collaborator, thereвЂ™s no such equivalent feature built-in here.

John and I used different colors to indicate who made which annotations.Д«esides the slow sync time, another key limitation I discovered in my testing is that GoodNotes doesnвЂ™t offer a way to identify who made which annotations in a document.

#GOODNOTES DESKTOP UPDATE#

When there is an update to a shared document, youвЂ™ll be notified via a blue badge accompanying the document in your library, which can also inform you of which page in the document received changes.

As an app, GoodNotes offers tools for a range of use cases in areas of business, education, or personal uses, so there will likely be lots of scenarios where the new collaboration option is valuable despite lacking real-time updates. For example, sharing meeting notes before or after a meeting takes place to get feedback from your team, or letting multiple people annotate a draft-in-progress. As such, GoodNotesвЂ™ collaboration doesnвЂ™t serve as a replacement for more real-time solutions such as collaborative whiteboard apps, but rather itвЂ™s better suited for situations where changes are made over an extended period of time. Once a document has been shared, it will be badged with a special icon in your library, and all shared documents are additionally housed in a new Shared tab in GoodNotesвЂ™ navigation bar.Д¬ollaboration means that multiple people work in a document at once making their own annotations and changes, though there will regularly be a delay of 15-30 seconds before changes appear for all users. In this case, anyone who has the link can access the file. Like other apps supporting iCloud collaboration, the feature works by generating a link which grants collaborators access to the shared files, provided they have the source app installed. The way this works is simple: from your documents library, tapping a documentвЂ™s title will open a context menu where Collaborate is a new option or, while working in a document, tapping the share icon will also reveal the Collaborate option.

The latest app to add iCloud collaboration is GoodNotes, which in todayвЂ™s version 5.5 enables you to share documents with other GoodNotes users so you can work together in the same document at once. While iCloud doesnвЂ™t provide the kind of instant, real-time collaboration found with a service like Google Docs, the undisputed king of this domain, itвЂ™s nonetheless a solid option that provides valuable utility in apps that support it.

On AppleвЂ™s platforms the company offers its native iCloud collaboration features that apps can adopt, and which are also available in first-party apps like Notes, Reminders, and the iWork suite. One of the tech trends I expect has been accelerated by the current state of the world is a demand for collaboration features in software.

Goodnotes desktop