✏️ New Goodnotes 6 Features you NEED to try! | whiteboard, text doc, beta

0:00 Goodnotes recently announced a ton of new features that's coming to GoodNote 6. And the open beta is finally rolling out and I did sign up for the open beta. So, in today's video, I thought it would be fun to share with you some of these new features to give you like a first look into how these features work on GoodNote 6. Like I said, it is still in beta, so there are some bugs and just some things that aren't working properly. So, just keep that in mind as I'm showing you these features. I'm sure they'll sort all the bugs out before it's released to everyone. But okay, let's take a look at all the new features. Going into GoodNotes, you will see I just put together this little page of some of the new features that is now available in Good Note 6 with this beta. And this is basically everything that I'm going to be covering in this video. So, I'm just going to go to my home screen first. And I do want to point out that if you are wanting to opt out of

0:47 the beta software, you can. You can just go to your account here and then you can go to beta features and then you can select leave beta. So, if it's too buggy for you and you just don't want to be a part of it anymore, you can leave and then it will be restored to the original GoodNotes. Something that I'm noticing that I don't know what is now the like official way of creating a new document. We have this new button here, but literally a few minutes ago, I still had that default plus button here where you created a new document, if you know what I mean. So, that just randomly changed, but okay. So, to create a new document, we're going to click on this new button. And then you will see a few new options that we have here for the beta. So these are all the different modes that we're used to having a quick note, scanning a

1:33 document, all that. Then we have here a few things here at the top, which I guess is the more popular options that people pick. And you can already see the new features are the text document and the whiteboard. And what I have here that I was just in this document, this is the whiteboard feature. So, I'm going to start off with that. So, I'm going to click new here, and I'm going to choose whiteboard. And then you can go ahead and edit a few settings for your whiteboard to set it up. So, you can give it a name. So, I'm just going to say beta test. You can also set the language from here. You can choose what pattern you want as the background for your document. So, you can use a square grid, a dot grid, or blank. So, I'm just going to keep it with dot grid. And then

2:19 you can choose the color of the background of the paper. So you have white, yellow, and black. And it doesn't seem there are any custom options yet. Maybe that will be something they add in or maybe just doesn't work as well with the infinite canvas. So I'm going to click on create. And now we have our whiteboard here. So the idea of this is kind of like if you're familiar with the free form app from Apple, and I mean there's been apps that's been doing this for years, but it just gives you a large canvas. I believe it's infinite. I'm not sure um because I know that free form has a limit I think to like 400% or something. So you can only zoom out so much. But yeah, I'm not sure how much GoodNotes's canvas is. It seems like there is a limit. So this is pretty much

3:05 it. But I don't believe you're going to ever just use it up really easily cuz it is quite large. So I'm just going to zoom in until the dots seem like an appropriate size for me to comfortably write in. And just a lot of the other features that is now new with GoodNote 6 I can see is made to incorporate this like whiteboard effect. I'm sure there are so many different use cases for this type of canvas. You can either have like teachers who are doing lessons and are using their iPad to do that. I think this could be really nice if you want to just like do a huge summary slashbrain map of a topic maybe that you're studying or just brainstorming a project. This could be really nice because it really just gives you so much real estate to work with. And just going back to this one that I have here, you

3:52 will see you can zoom out and view your entire workspace and then that's just a small speck on this entire canvas. And then you can zoom in obviously to a certain area. Now, let's get to some other new features. Now, of course, you'll probably already notice that one of the bigger changes that they made, apart from just like the new mode, is that we have a new look to our toolbar here. So, it's kind of like a floating toolbar, although you can't move it around. It's still like set here at the top, but essentially, it's doing a lot of grouping for your tools. So, you will see the first option we have here is our lasso. So, you can just like normally lasso something. You can tap on it to see all the different options for the

4:38 lasso tool that we always had. So you can still choose between a rectangle and freehand. And then you just have all your toggles for the different types of things that will be included in your lasso selection. And now when you click on the pen, it will give you all of your writing tools, which I think makes sense. It's nice. So you will see we have the pen tool here. And when you tap on it, you can see a bunch of the settings. But also, you can also access those settings by just clicking on this little settings icon for when you have the pen tool selected. And then those same settings are here as well. And of course, we still have our thicknesses that you can set. And also just the colors. That hasn't changed from what I can see. But essentially, we have our pen tool, the eraser, the pencil, and the highlighter all under this one

5:24 nested little icon. So when I switch back to the lasso, that will disappear and then that will bring it up again. But again, all of these work fairly similarly to how they used to. Now, next in the toolbar, you will find our text tool. And this is the one that I have been having the most headaches with, but again, it's beta, so I really hope they sort this out. But now, when you're creating a new text box, so I'm just going to go ahead and just type text box. you will see that this is now where you will adjust everything. So, it's kind of in this hovering little toolbar menu bar thing that you have for your text, which is fine, but I feel like this is a lot more glitchy than just having like a static menu here that you can quickly just change things for. But

6:11 what my main issue is so far is using fonts and things. It's just been kind of unusable in this beta so far. Now, I've only been using it for like a day, I believe. Do keep that in mind. So for instance, I don't really like the font selector. So when you go to choose a font, it gives you three defaults, which are just the defaults that GoodNotes give you. It's not like your recently used fonts or anything. It's just their default. So we have modern, classic, and technical. And then you can go into custom font and choose from your font list. And again, I don't really like this hovering menu cuz it feels really small and hard to use. Um, so hopefully I don't know what they're going to do. But also once I have tried to like change a font, so this font I always use

6:59 when I'm doing my digital planning cuz it's kind of like a handwriting font. When I tap on that and I go to choose like light, it's going to like the regular font option. As you can see, it says Kashmiroon regular, but I did click on light. But then when I just like go to change that. So let's go back to fonts again. this collapsible menu is now very small and uncomfortable to access. Then when I go to just change that to again light, it just won't do it. So again, this is probably just a bug. This is not like something that I'm guessing will be in the official release, but it's something to note. And also something that I'm really going to miss if they did remove this, I'm can't imagine that they would, is that I can't set like a default font.

7:44 So, whenever I create a new text box, it's going to default back to one of GoodNotes's fonts. And usually, you would be able to set like a default text style for GoodNotes, but now I'm going to have to go in and change the font every single time to whatever I want it to be. So, that's something that I'm really missing here with the text tool. And then lastly, I think this is the last thing that I noticed is that there's no spacing option that I can see. So, usually with your text, you would be able to adjust the spacing somewhere. So, that would be the spacing in between lines, but right now we don't have that anywhere. So, that's also something that I'm hoping they're bringing back. So, I think the whole text toolbar and text handling still

8:29 needs a few things worked out. But, just to show you, so what we do have in this toolbar is we have your just like color picker where you can choose your colors. You can also adjust your size. You can adjust again the font. And then this is the formatting of your text. So you can choose between bold or italicized, underlined, strike through, all that. And then you can set the alignment for your text as well as whether it's a dashed or numbered list. And then when you click on the three dots, you have all your other options here. And for text specifically, you will see we have format again. So again, you can choose between bold, itallic, underline, strike through, alignment again, and you can add a link from here. And then you can also click here to edit the text. So

9:15 then your keyboard or your scribble menu will pop up so you can edit the text. So that's text so far in this beta. I know I went pretty hard on it, but I just hope that they kind of sort this out cuz I've seen other comments on Instagram of people saying that text has been kind of unusable for them and that's why they've left the beta. But yeah, hopefully this changes soon. But moving on from that, we have here our elements tool. And from what I can tell, this is still pretty much the same. We have our images tool here. This is new here. This is the new shape section. I never used the shape area ever, but I think it's a lot more usable now. And again, I think this is to really promote like this whiteboard option. So, let's go over all the things

10:00 that are in the shapes toolbar. So the first option I believe is just like transforming whatever you draw into a shape. So I can draw like a triangle and it's going to snap into a perfect triangle, circle, whatever. You get the gist. So that is what that tool is. But you also have here presets for shapes as well. So I can select the rectangle and just pull to draw a rectangle, circle or oval, triangle, and diamond. These are the shapes that most people use when they're creating diagrams. So, it makes sense why they have those there as presets. But when you have one of these shapes selected, whether it's the presets or this custom one where you just draw and it snaps into a shape, you can also go ahead and edit a few things from this little right hand side of the

10:47 menu. So, you will see here you can adjust your stroke settings. So, solid, dashed, or dotted lines and the width and arrow heads, which I will be getting to. And then you can also obviously select the color. But what's really nice is now from here you can adjust whether you want to have a fill color for your shape. And you can also set what the fill opacity will be. So this is 20% that I have right now. Let's go ahead and do one that is like 60%. Let's just draw a shape. So as you can see it's still a bit see-through but a lot less. And then of course you can go ahead and go all the way to 100% which will just be like a solid fill color. So you can't see through it or anything. And then also for each shape when you tap on it,

11:32 you will see a few options as well. So obviously from here you can go ahead and adjust the color can adjust from here if we want to turn off or on the fill color and the opacity for that fill color. And also in this menu you can adjust from here the width of your stroke and if you want it to be solid, dashed or a dotted line. So I'm going to set it to dotted just to show you. And this is obviously a rectangle. So when you go to resize it, it's going to stay as a rectangle and you can just reshape and resize it a bit. But when you click on this option right here, it's kind of going to break your shape, I guess. So then you have it more as like a free form shape that you can resize however you want. So you can

12:19 also toggle that in that setting. And then of course we just have all our regular settings like duplicating, deleting, and then yeah, all of these. But something that they're definitely trying to promote is like connecting shapes and making diagrams. So that is where these little arrow options come in. So when you select one, so this one has more straight lines and this one has curved lines. And I'm going to draw a arrow from this shape to this circle. So I'm just going to do like this. And since I have this straight line selected, this is what it's going to look like. You can edit this to your liking a bit, you can see these handles pop up. So you can clean it up a bit more and just really edit it to your liking. And this is where those handles

13:05 come in. So when you have one of these selected and you go to your settings here, you can choose what you want the starting point to be and the end point. So, for instance, for this shape here, this one, it's set to be like a straight line, and then the end is an arrow, but I can change this to be also an arrow at the beginning, and the end, I'm going to make it like a filledin arrow. So, then this is what it's going to look like. But yeah, this is just really nice when you want to connect different shapes together. So, I'm going to choose this one. I have the curved arrow. Now, my settings are straight, and I'm going to make it like a filledin arrow at the end. And I'm just going to draw a line like this from my circle to my rectangle. And then that is what it's

13:51 going to look like. I can tap on this again and edit it to my liking if I wanted to have like a different direction or something. But then that is how I can edit and connect these shapes. You will also see that you will be able to add text in your shapes. Obviously, you can add independent text over like your block by just using the text tool, but it's just really easy when you want your text to be centered in this shape. You just tap on your shape, go to the three dots, and select edit text. And then you can add in your text here. As you can see, you can edit the font and all that like I already said. So then you have text in that. And what's also really nice is you can easily edit these diagrams by just moving the shapes

14:37 around. So if I want to make space here in this section, I can just click on this rectangle, move it around, and my arrow will move alongside it since it is now connected to that little box. Same for this one. I'm going to click on it, move it, click on this one, move it around. And yeah, they're all still connected, but you can easily just move them around. I believe that's everything that I wanted to cover about these shapes. But you will also see that you also have a few templates that you can use for this. So here in the top right, you will see a plus button. And here you have some templates. And they give you a few. And then they say view 100 plus templates. So they have a bunch here that you can choose from. So they have brainstorming,

15:23 collaboration, planning, education, diagramming. This is really cool that you can use these templates to your liking. So I'm going to go ahead and choose like to vin diagram. I'm going to click add to board and then it automatically adds it in here for me and I can just use it. So that saves you a lot of time. I can also go here and just select a retrospective. It's going to add it in. So, it's going to add date, project, objective, team members, what went well, what needs improvement, all that. And I can just fill it in. So, it's nice that they have these templates. I'm wondering if you're going to be able to create your own custom templates in the future, but they have templates for you to use as well in this little area here. I'm not sure why it says like 100 plus templates because

16:10 I don't think there are 100 yet. Um, but maybe that's just for like in the future there will be a lot of templates for you to choose from. But right now, these are the ones that they have available in the beta. So that is the shapes tool and like diagrams and all that in the new update. Then we just have of course our stickies. That's always been there. We have tape that you can use. That's always been there. We have laser which again will be really nice when you're using like this as a whiteboard or something. And then nested underneath these set of icons is just your audio recording, your audio playback and your ruler. So yeah, that is the gist of the whiteboard and also like the entirely newly designed toolbar. I do want to mention this, but I'm not going to be covering this in detail, but they also

16:55 introduced a bunch of new AI features. Took good notes. Of course, all companies are incorporating AI into their programs. You're just now supposed to be able to like ask AI about your documents. So you will see here in this little section, I have my AI section. It says warming up. Just give it a second. And here you can see it's doing a few things. So it says, "Hello, how can I help you with your notes?" And then you have a few quick actions here. So it says, "Generate diagram, summarize, suggest questions, solve, teach me." So it's going to be really nice, especially for students. Sadly, I'm not a student anymore. Otherwise, this would have been really helpful. But let's go ahead and select just like the generate diagram option. So create a horizontal flowchart

17:42 timeline. mind map. I'm going to say mind map from all pages in light shades of gray. I'm going to say classic color and I'm just going to let it generate and see what it does. Okay, that doesn't look too bad. So, I'm going to go ahead and just How do I add this in? Do I just drag it over? Yeah, I think it's using this like retrospective template that I imported as reference since it has all this here. So now I have kind of like a summary of my entire retrospective. I believe if this was filled out, it would probably include some more things, but that is GoodNotes AI. It's incorporating that a lot in this update, and I'm sure you're going to be able to do a lot with this, but I just wanted to mention that. Then the last thing I want to mention is

18:29 the new text document feature. I'm going to switch to my keyboard case so I can actually show you how this works. So to create a text document, we're going to go to the new section again and we're going to select text doc. Okay. So for this text document, it just works as like a uniform text document. I feel like it works a lot like notion if you've ever used it. It says write type forward slash for quick tools or ask goodnotes AI basically. So there we have my just first line of text. You will see we have these little dots here. So, which you'll be able to use as like a way to reorganize lines of text. So, if I want to rearrange this, I'm going to click here and just drag that to in between two and three. So, that is how

19:16 you can easily rearrange lines of text. Again, similar to what we have with GoodNotes, when you click the forward slash option, you will see a few options come up. So, you will have GoodNotes AI. You have paragraph which I believe is just like plain text. Then you have heading one, two, and three. You have bulleted list, numbered list, to-do list, toggle, which is really cool. Code block, a table, block quote, divider. You can add images, videos, audio. You can add a table of contents, three columns. Again, if you've ever used notion, this will feel very familiar. Um, so I'm just going to go ahead and set heading three, and I'm going to write heading. I'm going to add in a forward slash. I'm going to type in table. Click on that. And then I can have a table here. So I can write one.

20:04 As you can see, you can insert from a row here. You can insert columns. You can delete columns, delete rows. You can resize your boxes for your tables. Here can go also go ahead and fill like the background color of your blocks as well if you want to. So, whatever block you're in, you just click on the fill and choose a color. I'm wondering if you can select more than one. Let's drag. Yeah, there I have that entire row selected. I'm just going to change the color of that row. You can also here merge cells and then also adjust the cell border. So, that is tables within your text document. I'm going to click forward slash again just to show you. This is what to-do lists look like, which is really nice. And you can

20:49 obviously takeick these off as you complete the items in the to-do list. I'm going to add a toggle here. So, if you don't know what a toggle is, so you're basically going to maybe like ask a question. This is really nice if you're doing like any revision and you want to have like exam questions with answers to them. So then in the toggle at the top, you're going to write your question and then you're going to open that up. I'm going to write here answer. So then I can toggle that to show the answer or I can close it to hide the answer. So that is what a toggle list looks like here. The fact that you can add a code block is also really surprising to me. So you can have your code there. I'm going to choose here image. And just to show you what that looks like, I'm going to click upload file and upload a photo from my photo

21:36 library. And just like with like notion, you can choose what you want your alignment for your image to be. can also give it like a little caption for your image. And to change like the how big it is in your document, you will see these little icons here at the side of your image. It's really hard to see with this image, but you just drag that to make it smaller or larger. And this is where your alignment will play a role. So, I'm going to center my alignment. So, my image will stay in the middle of my document. I also want to show you the three columns. So, this is what that looks like. So this will just be like regular text but you can have columns for that. So it's kind of similar to like a table but also not really cuz it's still part of like your text

22:22 document. So I can from here go ahead and insert like an image. Let's go ahead and import. And as you can see now the image is stuck to the size of that column since I'm working in that. I'm going to add another image to this column as well. That is what that looks like. So this is really nice if you want to have like three different sections within your text document. Um then you can use these columns. When you select your text, you will also be able to change the color. So you will see here text color. I'm going to change my text to maybe like blue. And then you can also select what you want like the highlight color to be. So I'm just going to select this text. Go to color and go to background color. And then I'm going to choose blue background. So then it's kind of like looks like my text is

23:09 highlighted. You can also when you have your text selected play around with like type what it is. So you can change it to here from here to like a heading or a list or a quote or to-do list. You can play around with the formatting from here. You can add a link to your text. Copy all that from here. And of course you have some tools here at the top. So again you have image but you can obviously just like do a forward slash and add an image but you can also do it from here. Also from here you can add a table. This is the table that just popped up or you can do a little audio recording which is really nice. So if you are recording maybe like a lecture typing out your notes then this is really nice. Again we have a little AI icon here in the top left and you can see here review for clarity. You can ask

23:55 it to like rewrite something check the grammar. Create a summary. critique my document, generate TLDDR, that's all really nice. So text in GoodNotee 6 is now actually finally usable. And if you don't want to go the handwriting route for maybe like a specific class that text just makes more sense in, you don't need to have a separate app for your text documents and a separate app for handwritten documents and notebooks. So those are all the new features that I wanted to cover. I hope you guys enjoyed and found this video interesting. As you saw in this video, there are still a lot of things they still need to like sort out and just streamline so it works nicely. But yeah, it's just really nice to see these features coming to GoodNotes. And hopefully some of the more anticipated features are also going

24:40 to be coming soon. But okay, thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate you and I'll see you next time. Bye. [Music]