I am seeing people migrate to drawing apps for note taking more and more now, I am a student.

The app “Concepts” is drawing app that has lately been covering note taking capabilities as well. They have 2 options for their tool menu:

A “linear” toolbar (like the one on Goodnotes 6) and a tool “wheel”. The wheel expands to a wheel shaped color palette when picking colors

Goodnotes needs to implement this option for people who want more space to navigate and take non-linear notes (like mind maps), while also keeping the regular toolbar (for people who who use Goodnotes for more linear approaches in note taking).

“Concepts” utilizes this wheel design but falls short in its potential use cases. This is because the menu, which is designed in a very spatially efficient way, only expands when selecting colors.

If Goodnotes had this feature, but instead allowed the wheel to expand for all tools (not just color selection), a lot of people would be able to take notes with faster navigation since the expanded wheel would be able to turn when dragged by the user to select the desired tool.

For example, you could divide the wheel into multiple layers/rings, which have slots that can be used to store pen preferences.

Say, I would like a dotted 0,45 mm ball point pen. I’d simply have to tap the wheel on the pen selection tab (and maybe this could also be implemented as a 2-3 finger tap shortcut), the wheel would expand to the rings/layers in which I stored my preferred setting, and I simply select it.

Colors could be selected in a similar fashion.

The wheel would be moveable for optimal spatial efficiency, simply by dragging it.

In “Concepts”, if you drag the wheel to the side, it turns into a regular toolbar. In the corners, it behaves like a wheel.

The menu designs used in the “Concepts” app can be found in the images attached. The images with the overlayed window of pen options, can be reproduced by tapping a tool selection tab, like selecting a pen. Like I said before, this menu design (second picture) could be more efficient if it was part of the wheel like the color palette.

Goodnotes should turn this menu into separate rings which expand from the core of the wheel.