The Future of GoodNotes for Mac

Published in

GoodNotes Blog

5 min readJul 3, 2019

Earlier this year, we launched our all-new iOS app GoodNotes 5. It has been rewritten from scratch with a much more stable and flexible internal architecture, paving the way for the future of GoodNotes. Rewriting the iOS app also meant that we had to rewrite the MacOS companion because the new GoodNotes 5 was no longer compatible with the outdated existing Mac app. A lot of people were disappointed that we didn’t launch a Mac app together with the iOS version because they still had to stick with GoodNotes 4 if a Mac version was crucial to their workflow. Thanks to the hard work of our Mac team, we released an early-access version shortly after the iOS launch. This beta version is available for everyone who signs up for access. We shipped updates with new features and improvements on a regular basis and were almost ready to launch it publicly when Apple officially announced the start of “Project Catalyst” during their annual developer’s conference in June. It’s a framework that allows developers to bring their iPad apps to the Mac, with a relatively low effort. It still requires a lot of work to create a great Mac app but at least developers don’t have to rewrite significant portions of the code, as it was the case previously.

We believe that it is a great opportunity for us to unify the GoodNotes experience between iOS, iPadOS, and MacOS and will launch the new GoodNotes for Mac using Apple’s new framework.

We wanted to be as transparent as possible and communicate our decision with all of our customers, especially the ones that are desperately waiting for a solution to access their GoodNotes documents on the Mac. The decision was made after carefully considering all the benefits and tradeoffs.

Project Catalyst is a framework that allows developers to bring their iPad apps to the Mac, with a relatively low effort

Benefits

1. Catalyst creates a shared experience across devices

Of course, we acknowledge that the Mac and MacOS are different from mobile devices and the mobile operating system iOS. Still, we’re excited about the opportunity to unify the experiences across devices, which we believe, will benefit everyone greatly. If you’re familiar with GoodNotes on one device, you can seamlessly pick up another without having to relearn how the app works. It also creates much clearer expectations about which features are available on which platform. Almost any functionality that you know from the iPad can now be used on the Mac, provided that it makes sense. For example, adding the exact same Camera Tool from the iOS version to the Mac doesn’t add any real value as the Mac only has a front camera. Our team is dedicated to creating an experience that respects what makes the Mac a Mac.

2. Catalyst allows us to streamline our development

Our team’s main focus is on making a great iPad app, as this is how people naturally use GoodNotes. While the Mac companion is certainly important for a lot of people, it always used to be number 2 behind its iOS counterpart. Development cycles were longer, bugs weren’t fixed as frequently, and new features weren’t added as often as on iOS. With Catalyst, this finally changes: New features and improvements now don’t have to be written from the ground up twice. Instead, we can write them once and make them available on multiple platforms. At the same time, we can offer faster support and better maintenance, which should benefit everyone as well.

3. Catalyst apps are the future of MacOS

There are many fantastic apps available for Mac and some of them became indispensable for all of us. Still, in the past years, the Mac App Store hasn’t received the same love and attention by Apple, customers, and developers as the iOS App Store. With Catalyst, Apple is making it much more attractive for developers to bring their iPad apps to the Mac, which will improve what the Mac App Store has to offer. Not every iPad app also makes a good Mac app but Apple is providing developers with the tools to make certain changes to let their apps behave more “Mac-app-like”.
Who knows, maybe at some point in the future, Apple will even enable Apple Pencil support right on the Mac. With the new “Sidecar” feature of iPadOS and MacOS Catalina, we can already use the iPad as a second monitor (including Apple Pencil support). The two platforms have never been so close together.

Tradeoffs

Here are the main tradeoffs that we considered and how we believe we can properly solve them.

1. Catalyst apps will require MacOS 10.15

Sadly, the new framework for apps will only work on Apple’s latest OS release. The good news is that MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) will be supported on the exact same devices as it’s predecessor MacOS 10.14 (Mojave). If you’re already using the latest version of MacOS, you will be able to run the new GoodNotes for Mac once it is launched. The early-access Mac version also required 10.14 to work on your Mac because many of the APIs we were using in the app aren’t supported on older operating systems.

2. MacOS 10.15 launches this fall

Apple usually releases the public versions of their new operating systems in early September, so you’ll need to wait a little longer before you can use our new Mac version. In case you don’t want to wait, you can still sign up for our early access program. We will continue to send out invites until the launch of Catalina but won’t add any new features or improvements to this build. If you sign up, we’ll also notify you when the new MacOS version is available.
By the time the new MacOS launches, our Mac version will have the same functionality as the iPad version out-of-the-box. Otherwise, we would have had to code every feature from scratch.

Conclusion

We hope that this article helps you to understand our thought processes and answers your most urgent questions regarding GoodNotes for Mac. We’re excited about the opportunities that Project Catalyst brings for GoodNotes and believe that the benefits will prevail the tradeoffs.