There's a world of read-later apps, and then there's a world of note-taking apps. And there's rarely any overlap. Read-later apps are usually quite simplistic by design, and if you want features like highlighting, it'll often cost a $10/month premium (Matter and Readwise Reader being prime examples). On the other side, 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 the sweet spot. It's a natively-designed read-later and link collection app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It syncs securely using iCloud and can easily add and show articles from anywhere. But the best part is that it comes with convenient research aids usually reserved for note-taking apps.
Highlighting and note taking on the web
It is surprisingly hard to find a reliable tool to highlight web articles (no, Chrome extensions won't get you far). This is why I was pleasantly surprised to see how simple and effortlessly the highlighting works on the GoodLinks app. It's like you're using Apple Books, or a Kindle.
On Mac, select your text, right-click, choose Highlight and the app automatically applies your default highlight color. You can right-click again to change the color if you'd like. On iPhone or iPad, select your text and use the Highlight 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 > Default color.
And then there's the contextual note taking. You can add notes to a highlight, or to any selected text. Any text where you add a note will be highlighted automatically. On the Mac, the Add Note feature is in the right-click menu, and on the iPhone, it's in the pop up context menu.
Here, just type anything you want, 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 highlights, and the color of your highlights as well. This makes it easy to track or quickly jump to a highlight just using the scroll bar. On Mac, you can also click on a highlight in the sidebar, and on the iPhone, simply tapping on a label works too. You can even add a widget that will show your latest highlights on the iPhone home screen.
Sharing and exporting notes
Highlighting tools are most useful when they let you share your work. This is something that GoodLinks excels at.
By default, you can share all your highlights and notes in a single Markdown file. The file will have the title of the article, URL, highlights, and all your notes, in one place. On Mac, go to File > Export Highlights. On iPhone, the Export feature is inside the three-dotMenu button in the toolbar.
To just share individual highlights, right-click any highlight (or note) to directly share it to any app (there's a nice integration for the Notes app). You can just copy it out in plain text.
The GoodLinks experience
GoodLinks offers something other reading tools don't, and as a bonus, it's not dependent on the web.
In pricing too, GoodLinks is different. The app costs $9.99 to buy outright for all Apple platforms. The highlighting and note taking features are part of GoodLinks Premium, which isn't exactly a subscription. If you pay $4.99, you will get access to all new features released for one year. If you cancel your payments, you get to keep the features released during the year you paid.