There’s a world of read-later apps and a world of note-taking apps. And there’s very little overlap. Read-later apps are usually pretty simple by design, and if you want features like highlighting, it’s often a $10/month extra charge (Matter and Readwise Reader are prime examples). On the other hand, there are full-fledged note-taking apps with an overwhelming amount of features (like Obsidian or Notion), probably more than the average person would ever need.
GoodLinks finds just the right thing. It’s a natively developed read-later and link-collecting app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It syncs securely via iCloud and can easily add and view articles from anywhere. But best of all, it’s packed with handy research tools usually reserved for note-taking apps.
Highlight and take notes on the web
It’s surprisingly difficult to find a reliable tool for highlighting web articles (no, Chrome extensions won’t get you very far), so I was pleasantly surprised at how easy and effortless highlighting is in the GoodLinks app. It’s as if you were using Apple Books or a Kindle.
Photo credit: Khamosh Pathak
On the Mac, select the text, right-click and select Highlights and the app will automatically apply your default highlight color. You can right-click again to change the color if you want. On iPhone or iPad, select your text and use the Highlights option from the pop-up menu. You can tap the text again to change the color. To change the default color, go to Settings > Highlights > Standard color.
And then there is the contextual note feature. You can add notes to a highlight or to any selected text. Any text you add a note to is automatically highlighted. On the Mac, the Attached note The function is located in the right-click menu and on the iPhone in the pop-up context menu.
Photo credit: Khamosh Pathak
Just type whatever you want here and GoodLinks will save it with the highlighted text.
GoodLinks has a very nice design detail in the scroll bar. It shows little color labels that correspond to your tags and also the color of your tags. This makes it really easy to keep track of a tag or quickly jump to it just by using the scroll bar. On Mac, you can also click on a tag in the sidebar and on iPhone, just tapping on a label works too. You can even add a widget that shows your most recent tags on the iPhone home screen.
Share and export notes
Highlighting tools are especially useful when you can use them to share your work, and that’s where GoodLinks excels.
Photo credit: Khamosh Pathak
By default, you can share all your markup and notes in a single Markdown file. The file contains the article title, URL, markup, and all your notes in one place. On Mac, go to file > Export highlights. On the iPhone export Function is located within the three pointsMenu Button in the toolbar.
To share just individual highlights, right-click on a highlight (or note) to share it directly to any app (there’s a nice integration for the Notes app), or you can just copy it as plain text.
The GoodLinks experience
GoodLinks offers something that other reading tools don’t and, as a bonus, it doesn’t depend on the Internet.
GoodLinks is also different in pricing. The app costs $9.99 for all Apple platforms. The highlighting and note-taking features are part of GoodLinks Premium, which is not exactly a subscription. If you pay $4.99, you get access to all new features for a year. If you cancel your payments, you get hold the features released in the year of your payment.
