Let me start by saying this: I’m pretty sure I’m not using GoodLinks to its fullest potential. I bet there are some crazy shortcuts out there, that solves some incredibly complicated problems by integrating GoodLinks with, well, everything or something. I don’t know, I just get that feeling.
Me, I just want to save links sometimes, and I want to avoid filling up my Pocket reading list with references, documentation, and code snippets for future projects. This, together with someplace to store research links for newsletters, felt like something GoodLinks could do well.
GoodLinks follows the modern look and feel of iPadOS apps. You’ll get three panes on the larger devices, and up to two on the smaller, which is fine. Settings is an overlay, so the app flows from your main views, to the list of links, and a reader window.
That’s right, you could use GoodLinks as a read it later app too. It does a decent job scrapping web pages of their nonsense. The actual reading experience isn’t as nice as in, say, Pocket, but you do get pretty fine-grained control over font, font-size, line-height and column width. I could see GoodLinks being good enough for this, too. That is, if you want to mix your long-form stories, with ways to animate SVGs.
Moving back to the user interface, the list of your main views, the navigation pane if you will, is simple and straightforward. You got your unread links, your starred ones, as well as links without a tag, and the ones that you have, in fact, read. Speaking of read or not, I like to manually mark links as read. This helps in my research. You might want to handle that differently, there’s a setting for that. There are also swipes to delete or share links, or whatever it is you want to do, from the actual link list, which is our next pane.
How you organize your links is key. You could just throw everything in there and worry about it later, that’s what I did, but then I changed my mind a couple of weeks ago, and deleted it all. This time, I’m curating the links harder, even deleting links as I feel certain I’m done with them. Since a lot of research for newsletters end up in GoodLinks, that’s going to be a lot of them. You might want to deal with your saved links differently. I feel pretty confident that GoodLinks will work for you.
Because that’s the thing, GoodLinks just works. It’s easy to save a link, through the share sheet obviously, although you can use the plus icon in the app as well. When you share the link, you tag it (if you want to), and it ends up in GoodLinks. Your links will sync via iCloud, meaning that they’re everywhere, almost instantly. It all works really well. There are widgets and Siri Shortcuts, too, and URL schemes for deeper integration. And if you subscribe to any news outlets, you can add those to the app, making sure you’ll get the full article you’re saving. That’s a pretty cool feature.
I like GoodLinks, a lot. It was a little tricky to get into, I found it a little rough, for some reason, but I think that was mostly me not having a clear idea what to use it for. Now, I think it’s found its place in my workflow, for all those links I want to save, but not bookmark, and not necessarily read later.
🔗🔗🔗🔗 out of 5 — Great!
GoodLinks is $5, with no in-app purchases.
