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 tend to be pretty simplistic in design, and if you want features like highlighting, they often cost a $10/month premium (Matter and Readwise Reader are good 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.
Good Links – A 'Read it Later' App (Mac)
GoodLinks finds the sweet spot. It’s a natively designed read-later and link collection app for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It syncs securely with iCloud and makes it easy to add and display articles from anywhere. But best of all, it comes with handy research tools normally reserved for note-taking apps.
It’s surprisingly hard to find a reliable tool to mark up web articles (no, Chrome extensions won’t get you very far). That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy and effortless the marking works on the GoodLinks app. It’s just like using Apple Books or a Kindle.
And then there’s contextual notes. You can add notes to a highlight or to any selected text. Any text you add a note to will automatically be highlighted. On Mac, the Add Note function is in the right-click context menu, and on iPhone, it’s in the pop-up context menu.
