Currently I’m using Bear for collecting and saving articles from the web, but it struggles with the large number of articles. That’s why I’m looking at Craft. I made a Shortcut for saving articles from Safari to Craft and that works pretty good. My question is, does anybody use Craft with a large number (>1,000) of notes/articles? I’m curious if the performance and search remains good.
Personally, I found sync with their storage was solid with no issues. Sync with use of iCloud external storage sucked.
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Good question. Maybe as apps get more powerful, I’m seeing a trend toward (attempting to) combine note-talking and document storage into one app. I still think that should be two apps: (1) Ulysses, Bear, Obsidian, Agenda, NotePlan, or others for self-written notes and (2) DEVONthink, EagleFiler, KeepIt, Evernote, or others for document capture, storage, and retrieval.
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I agree with this approach. I think adding a larger number of files to note taking apps is a mistake, or at least in the long-term not ideal. Not only does it use up a lot of storage (Craft has a limit depending on the plan you are on) but risks slowing down the note taking application.
I prefer to keep my research files in an Obsidian vault and then, if and when needed, link files to a note or writing project. I recognize there is an advantage to having all notes and articles in a single app. One can quickly cross link them. However, I seldom need to cross link research articles and my writing; I just need to get to an article so I can summarize the essence of the research or copy/paste text for a quote in an article or presentation.
Thanks and I get your point. I’m not adding files like a pdf to notes, but save the articles as markdown notes from Safari. Essays that I save as a pdf are stored somewhere else.
That is a great approach. I should consider converting many of my PDF research files to markdown. Then I would feel fine with using them in any of my apps.
I’m using Keep It and EagleFiler. I’ve used DEVONthink Pro, too. EagleFiler is for documents I only need on my laptop and Keep It is for things I need in the field (on my phone). Don’t want to overload Keep It; version 1x didn’t take kindly to adding everything. V2 with FileProvider seems better at syncing; you just have to wait for the sync to happen before doing the next action with a note.
EagleFiler meets my needs; I’m only a computer technician.
If you want you can use this Shortcuts for downloading content from Safari to Craft. It works both on Mac and iPad.
I’m still on the fence of moving to Craft or staying with Bear, but I lean towards Bear. I’m using Bear for 5 or 6 years now and I really like the app. My performance issues might have been my own fault. I also prefer the way Bear handles files and that you can open it with preview just like you have in Apple Notes. Bear just feels more Mac native than Craft.
Thanks for the shortcut-I’ll make good use of it!
I’ve never tried Bear. One of my “requirements” is the ability to take a list of meeting follow-ups and send them directly to my task manager (now OmniFocus) with a link back to the Craft note.
CRAFT NOTE
OMNIFOCUS RESULT
The transfer feature is a nice one and I can see why you want it.
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I have more than a thousand notes with hundreds of articles saved on Bear. I haven’t experienced a slow down on Bear when it comes to search. But it could probably because most of the articles I saved are just one pager.
I’m slowly migrating everything to Craft as I am subscribed to a Business plan. I only have a less than a hundred articles save on Craft. But I enjoy using the Daily Notes so far.
I, too, am using Bear for that long and loved it but I’m going to discontinue next month when my subscription ends. Sadly, they’ve taken a long time modernizing their app for my current needs. Even Apple Notes had catch up to them on features.
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My performance issues might have been my own fault. I do like Craft, but I don’t see an easy option for personal backups and that is one of my requirements. You can export files, but there is no real backup option (as far as I know).There is an option for external locations, but on iPad that requires iCloud Drive.
Bear offers great backup and export options and after playing with Panda, I believe Bear 2.0 will be great.
I’m also considering moving everything to Obsidian or perhaps iA Writer. The latter is really a Swiss Army knife in disguise.