New Apple Pencil Pro features come to the Goodnotes iPad note-taking app including support for its squeeze and barrel roll gestures

Apple Pencil Pro with iPad
(Image credit: Gerald Lynch / Future)

When Apple announced the new M4 iPad Pro and M2 iPad Air last week it also announced new accessories as well. One of them, the Apple Pencil Pro, builds on previous iterations and adds two new features; a squeeze gesture and barrel roll. Now, a new update to Goodnotes is bringing support for both to the popular note-taking app.

The two gestures will both be supported by the latest Goodnotes app on all compatible iPad Pro and iPad Air tablets (the two new models, then) so long as they're using the Apple Pencil Pro and running iPadOS 17.5 or later. If you just got your new tablet, you'll need to install that update yourself — they come with iPadOS 17.4 installed out of the box.

Installing the update will be well worth it though, with both the squeeze gesture and barrel roll being big additions and ones that you're definitely going to want to take for a spin.

Take note

Goodnotes announced the new features via a blog post that detailed what users can expect when they use their new tablet and stylus.

Starting with the squeeze gesture, users will be able to quickly switch between tools, access common commands, and more while using the barrel roll feature — tilting the Apple Pencil Pro during use — will allow the Goodnotes fountain pen to "feel even more like the real thing, with its ink flow responding dynamically to the rotation of Apple Pencil Pro."

These are all good things, and the new barrel roll-powered Dynamic Ink feature could make a huge difference for big handwritten note-takers.

Be sure to get the latest version of Goodnotes and take the new features for a try yourself, they really do sound great.

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Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.