Goodnotes architectural plans, site photos, and annotations on iPad and iPhone

Many architects still think best with a pencil in hand. A floor plan starts as a sketch, an elevation changes after a client meeting, and tricky details get worked out during site visits. Goodnotes gives architects the freedom of pencil and paper, with every project on one device.

Begin a floor plan or elevation on a grid template, or import an existing drawing and mark it up with your Apple Pencil. The page scrolls without changing scale, so you can work on a large drawing that will still fit on your iPad. Adjust the pencil’s line weight as you go, and double-tap Apple Pencil to switch between drawing and erasing.

Then, when a design changes, you can continue without missing a beat. Simply select a wall and drag it somewhere else instead of redrawing the whole page. That makes it incredibly easy to try different layouts before committing to them.

Goodnotes keeps all of the context behind those decisions in the same place, too. Add photos from the job site right next to your plans, circle the area that needs attention, and jot down what happens next. With drawings, photos, and handwritten notes all on one page, it’s easy to return to a project later and understand its history and evolution.

When it’s time to work on site, Goodnotes also means you can leave rolls of plans behind. Every project lives on your device, and Goodnotes works offline, which is key to working on the go. Once you’re connected again, all of your changes sync across iPad, desktop, and the web, so the office, your clients, and the construction site can all work from the latest version of your plans.

The same workflow carries through the entire build. Engineers use Goodnotes to work up calculations on reusable templates and mark up details live in meetings, while site teams keep blueprints, annotated photos, and daily logs together and synced for those back in the office.

To see the workflow in action, watch architect Steve Giannetti sketch a house in Goodnotes:

Give your next project room to grow, from the first pencil stroke to the last site visit. Try Goodnotes for free.

Our thanks to Goodnotes for sponsoring MacStories this week.

You’ve set up Focus modes for work and weekends, built Shortcuts for repetitive tasks, and rearranged your Home Screen until everything is perfect. But then your phone buzzes with another notification for a newsletter, shipping update, or sale. Meanwhile, the important email you need to follow up on is buried under everything else. You’ve put thought into how your devices work for you, but are you in charge of your email or is it in charge of you?

SaneBox brings that same attention to detail to your email. Its AI filtering sorts your messages with nothing to install, and since 2010, it has helped people separate the messages that need attention from the ones that can wait.

SaneBox’s SaneLater folder keeps messages that can wait in a dedicated folder, so you can focus on more important things. SaneNews collects newsletters in one place, ready for when you can take a break. And if the same unwanted sender keeps interrupting your day, move one of their messages to SaneBlackHole to keep their future messages out of your inbox.

There are tools for staying on top of ongoing conversations, too. SaneNoReplies collects conversations where you haven’t received a response, so you can follow up. When you need an answer before a deadline, SaneReminders can remind you to check back. You can snooze messages, too, putting something aside until you have time.

SaneBox works with the account and apps you already use. It sorts messages on your mail server, so its folders are available in Apple Mail, Outlook, or whatever other email app you use on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

SaneBox also learns from your email habits, and you can teach it your preferences. If a message belongs somewhere else, move it and SaneBox will use that folder going forward. Plus, the Daily Digest brings together unread messages in your SaneBox folders, so you can review everything when you’re ready to wrap up your day.

Privacy matters, too. SaneBox sorts using message headers, not the contents of your emails, and it doesn’t store full messages or attachments. Its security is reviewed every year as part of Google’s verification process, audited independently by Leviathan Security Group, and tested through HackerOne.

All of that adds up to less time managing email and more time for everything else, which is why more than 100,000 people rely on SaneBox and have given it a 4.9 rating across more than 1,000 reviews.

Best of all, SaneBox fits elegantly into the email system you already know and use. Start a seven-day free trial with no credit card required, and get a $25 credit toward a SaneBox subscription, the equivalent of three months of use.

Our thanks to SaneBox for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Getting your whole family up and pointed in the right direction every morning isn’t simple. Everyone’s on a different schedule, and schedules change day to day. It’s a mess that’s solvable with the help of Crickets, the first alarm built for the realities of everyday family life.

Crickets lets everyone in your family see the alarms others choose to share and, with permission, change them. So instead of asking everyone when they need to be up the next day, you already know. If you’re the first one up, that’s a superpower. Whether it’s a flight that got delayed in the dead of night or a 5:00 AM message from your kids’ school about a schedule change, you can adjust alarms without waking a soul. And it works both ways: when a practice is canceled or a trip departs later, anyone you’ve granted edit access can push your alarm back while you sleep in.

Crickets even gives you tomorrow’s weather as you head off to bed. That way, you’ll know things like whether you should get up a little early to deal with the snow that’s forecast overnight.

Everyone in your circle is right there on your Home Screen and Lock Screen, too. Plus, with widget and Live Activities support, you can keep track of who’s already awake and who’s been hitting the snooze button. You’ll see your morning coming together without even opening the app.

Each person in your circle stays in control. They decide which alarms to share and which to keep private, and they can grant or revoke editing access whenever they want. People can belong to more than one circle without those circles merging, too. That way, parents can be in a circle with their kids, but their kids’ friends circle remains theirs alone.

A single subscription covers every member of your Apple Family Sharing group, allowing you to coordinate everyone’s alarms at once, while keeping each person’s sharing choices their own.

For a closer look at Crickets and a more coordinated start to the day, visit cricketsalarm.app. And, for a limited time, MacStories readers and AppStories listeners can get 50% off for six months with code MACSTORIES2026. Select Redeem on the paywall and enter the code.

Our thanks to Crickets for their support of MacStories this week.

It happens to all of us. You come across an article you want to read, but you’re in the middle of something and don’t have the time. GoodLinks gives those articles a home on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with a clean, customizable reading experience when you’re ready to return to them.

Recently updated for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS 27, GoodLinks lets you organize the articles you save for later with tags and stars before sitting down to read with its highly customizable reader. Article Sync, which is part of GoodLinks Premium, can sync complete articles along with their images through iCloud, so they’re available on every device.

GoodLinks also lets you highlight your favorite passages of articles, export your highlights as Markdown, and add notes to your highlights. Plus, GoodLinks has extensive Shortcuts support, allowing you to use what you save with your other apps and workflows, and a local API on the Mac to script your links, tags, and highlights.

The app can summarize articles using Apple Intelligence on compatible devices or external AI providers when you provide your own API keys. That allows you to use the model that suits your needs best, or you can turn off summarization entirely.

A single universal purchase covers iPhone, iPad, and Mac and includes all current features plus one year of feature upgrades. Everything you unlock is yours to keep. After that, an optional GoodLinks Premium subscription unlocks new features, which you keep even if you cancel.

Whether you’re catching up on your latest saved stories or building a complex reading workflow to handle hundreds of articles, visit GoodLinks to learn more and download the app today.

Our thanks to GoodLinks for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Hi, I’m Kushagra, the indie developer behind LookAway.

It’s very easy to get into the flow, lose track of time, and end up sitting for hours in front of a screen. By the end of the day, your eyes are tired and your shoulders are stiff.

That’s exactly what was happening to me. I knew I needed to take more breaks, but remembering to take them was difficult. I tried reminder apps, but they kept interrupting me at the wrong moment, so I had to stop using them.

That’s why I built LookAway – a native break reminder app for macOS with a lot of thought put into when to leave you alone.

LookAway automatically waits during meetings, videos, screen recordings, and more. It also waits for you to finish typing, dragging, or dictating so that you are not interrupted mid-thought. It gives you enough heads-up before a break, so you have time to wrap up. Between breaks, there are also gentle blink and posture reminders to help you check in with yourself.

And finally, there’s LookAway Mirror — a free companion app for iPhone and iPad. When your Mac takes a break, it can also block distracting apps and websites on your phone, so you don’t end up doomscrolling another screen.

I’ve put a lot of care into making LookAway something you’ll want to keep using. I’d love for you to try it. This week, MacStories readers can get LookAway for 30% off with the code MACSTORIES30 when you purchase it directly from the website.

Our thanks to LookAway for sponsoring MacStories this week.

You’ve been paying a tax on being healthy. Four dollars here for hydration, five there for sleep, another subscription for fasting, another for habits, and each one only ever sees its own slice of you. Your Apple Watch is already collecting the whole picture; what’s missing is a set of apps built to work with it, and with each other.

The FunnMedia Premium Plus Bundle Unlock 13 premium apps on your Apple devices for less than $5/month. fixes that with one subscription: 13 premium apps for health, wellness, and productivity, fully unlocked, for $59.99 a year.

What makes it work is that every app comes from the same small indie studio and is built around Apple Health, Apple Watch, and widgets. Because they all read from and write to Health, a log in one app shows up where it should, and the whole set shares one design language instead of feeling like a pile of downloads.

In practice, a day looks like this. SleepMinder scores last night before you’re out of bed. WaterMinder nudges you from your wrist before you’re thirsty. Calory scans your lunch barcode, FastMinder watches your eating window, and Couch to Fit squeezes in a seven-minute workout before dinner. FitnessView pulls all of it into dashboards that show real trends, HabitView keeps your streaks honest, and ZenMinder and RelaxTopia handle the wind-down. When your doctor asks for numbers, HealthExport hands over a PDF. Widgetive, NoteFolio, and ReplyCube cover the productivity side.

This isn’t an unknown lineup. WaterMinder is an Apple Editors’ Choice with more than 10 million downloads!

Bought individually, these subscriptions run past $300 a year. The bundle is $59.99, cancel anytime, and every app FunnMedia releases from here on is added automatically. Subscribe once and the next launch is already yours. Get it at funnmedia.com/bundle.

Dear MacStories reader,

It’s Zac here, the developer of Soulver — a notepad calculator you might have heard of. You type your thinking in plain text, and live answers appear in a column alongside as you go.

I started working on Soulver all the way back in 2005. The reason I’m still improving it 20 years on is the enthusiasm of the people who use it: nearly every day, someone writes to tell me how useful it is in their daily work. For many of them it’s one of those apps that stays open all day — for every budget, quote, and what-if.

This summer I released Soulver’s biggest update in 7 years, with 50+ new features. My favorite is trip planning: write out how many nights you’d like to spend in each destination, and Soulver works out the dates of every leg. Rearrange the itinerary and the dates update. There’s nothing quite like it.

Soulver continues to be a one-time purchase, not a subscription. By popular request, it’s now also a universal purchase: buy it once and it’s yours on Mac, iPad & iPhone. And this week, MacStories readers can get Soulver for $20 off: $39 instead of $59. The offer runs through September 11.

Soulver isn’t for everyone. But if you’re the kind of person who likes to think through problems with numbers step by step, give it a try — there’s a free 60-day trial, so you can see if it clicks for you.

Get Soulver 4 for $39 — $20 off for MacStories readers through September 11

Our thanks to Soulver for sponsoring MacStories this week.

If you read MacStories, you might have caught John’s Finalist 1.0 review a few years back. A lot has changed since: version 4.0 is out this week, its biggest update yet. Finalist is a paper-inspired daily planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch, giving you one place to plan your day, week and month. It wrangles all your stuff into one cohesive system to help you stay on top of it all: Reminders, Calendars, habits, tasks, notes, weather, and lots more.

New in 4.0 are Notes. Write native notes that sync to your iCloud, or point Finalist at a folder of markdown files and it round-trips cleanly with Obsidian vaults, GitHub, or any editor you like. Markdown tasks inside those files show up in your timelines as real tasks, on the right date, with the right tags. There are even timeline swimlanes per tag, to visualize any endeavour.

The Watch app is also new and it extends Finalist to your wrist. Its Now card answers the day’s current question: your first moves in the morning, the running time block with a countdown, an evening wrap-up with streaks to protect. It has some very nifty complications and a Smart Stack widget.

Or take a look at Broadsheet, a newsprint-inspired layout that shines on big screens. It has delightful touches throughout: tap a World Clock and the whole page retunes to another city, with date, weather, tasks, and appointments all in that timezone. The Timeline tab lets you sketch your day in pencil. Perfect for timeblocking, especially with Pencil Pro and its squeeze menu.

Apple has featured Finalist as App of the Day multiple times, and a large Discord community drives it forward. To help you try it, MacStories readers get 50% off their first year with code MACSTORIES40.

Our thanks to Finalist for sponsoring MacStories this week.

You think faster than you can type. Across a day of email, Slack, notes, and chatbot prompts, that gap quietly eats your time.

Cotypist closes that gap. It’s smart autocomplete for your Mac: as you write, it predicts your next few words and shows them inline, right at your cursor. Press Tab to take the next word or the whole line, then carry on. If a suggestion isn’t what you had in mind, keep typing and it catches up within a letter or two. Accept a word here and a line there, and you’ll have to type far less than you used to.

Most AI writing tools try to do too much and don’t sound like you. Cotypist only fills in the words you’d have typed anyway (just faster), and it picks up your vocabulary as you go, so the result still sounds like you. It works almost everywhere you write: Mail, Messages, Slack, Notes, Obsidian, your browser, even the prompt box in ChatGPT. And it all runs on your Mac, so nothing you type ever leaves your Mac.

Cotypist comes from the maker of Timing, the Mac time-tracker many MacStories readers already know, so it’s built to feel native and stay out of your way. Setup takes about a minute: drag it into Applications, launch it, then start typing, no account required.

Cotypist is free to download, with a 30-day Pro trial and no credit card. When the trial ends, you can keep Pro or drop to the free plan. Until the end of August, MacStories readers get 10% off their first bill at cotypist.app/macstories. Give it ten minutes and see if it can keep up with you.

Our thanks to Cotypist for sponsoring MacStories this week.