For me because Draft gives me the flexibility to go anywhere with it. It’s not my storage solution for notes, but definitely the starting point of most I write…
Confession……I reversed migration from Evernote to Craft and am back to EN. Craft is amazing, like truly wonderful. Unfortunately, I experienced several issues with Craft and taking a break to evaluate other options.
I only use Drafts for two purposes:
- To compose drafts of sensitive and or a complex emails to ensure that I don’t accidentally hit send prematurely.
- To strip unwanted formatting from text that I wish to save as plain or MD text.
All of my notes are in Apple Notes. I do not store many documents in Apple Notes, I use links instead. I don’t believe AN is designed to be a document repository. My documents are stored in iCloud and I have selected folders, e.g., Research, indexed in DEVONthink and also assessable via an Obsidian vault.
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Thanks- just checking I wasn’t missing something as I’m increasingly using Notes for all my note taking and journaling (in addition to paper for my miscellanies!)
Re: documents. Yes, that’s my feeling too. I’m usually using Hook to link to documents stored in iCloud which has the benefits of being location independent (although annoyingly not on iOS*). I am sometimes scanning a document from paper books/documents directly into notes, but not generally anything I want to keep long term. The OCR is very impressive.
*Limited iOS support coming soon, apparently.
I’m using iCloud links to avoid depending on third party linking (and a subscription🙂) and because the links are cross platform.
Interesting. I’ve started using Notes recently to store some PDFs having dropped Evernote from my set-up. Now I reflect on it, it’s only certain PDFs, mostly archival documents, manuals and other reference items— mostly things I’ve scanned with my phone. PDFs I’ll actually read in detail are stored in Dropbox (and from there most likely read and annotated in MarginNote). I can probably whittle that down, though. Doesn’t make sense to have multiple apps for this.
Amazing how much effort some of this thinking takes! Part of it is dealing with legacy systems— the way I do things now carries some of the baggage from ways of working I’ve established and moved on from years since…
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Just to jump in on this one: I’m also a Drafts user. It’s my primary destination/store for notes for a number of reasons, one of those being that I can do more with the notes I’ve taken there. Drafts actions are really powerful, both in authoring notes AND in reviewing them.
The reason I don’t generally use AN to store PDFs and other files is because I’m concerned that over the long-haul this may cause syncing problems and slow the syncing down. I prefer my documents in iCloud so I can access and manage them from Finder. I can also link or index those files/folders as needed–in my case I use Obsidian and DEVONthink for this purpose. One option is to import these to DT and copy the DT link to other apps, that works extremely well, though it is not my primary method–indexing rather than importing in DT is my preferred approach. I basically use Apple Notes for “notes.” I can’t use programs like Obsidian or Draft for notes because I often need to add a table, chart, etc., which while doable in other plain text editors it is harder.
Here is a simple example:
While not a lot compared to others, I currently have nearly 700 notes in AN and so far 
it works perfectly and works fast.
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All fair points. Giving this further thought, with my own setup and uses in mind, I’ll probably just forego using Notes and store all of my PDFs in Dropbox. Thanks for the nudge in that direction.
To call back to the original post, that’ll mean that my Evernote usage has been superseded by Dropbox (for files) and Drafts (for notes).
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It’s worth noting that HoudahSpot (Mac) is an excellent utility for searching Dropbox (and files in general). It brings some of the search capabilities of apps like Evernote and DEVONthink without the need to store documents within a database.
You can get very granular with the searches and can even create templates with pre-defined searches (e.g. files in my work folder that are > 1GB and files that were created in the past week). HoudahSpot is available directly from the developer and as part of the Setapp subscription.
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Good to know. I particularly like the folding text previews and the fact that it plays nicely with Alfred. I spend most of my time in iPadOS, but I’ll likely add this to my macOS stack on my “just in case” machine… 
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And that is exactly where my pain-point hit. For projects I will create a note and dump conversations, screenshots, pdf, pages, numbers docs, etc. EN will take everything I give it.
Coming back over from Craft, I forgot how seamless the email to note feature was.
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The email to EN feature is very handy. I have a workaround that copies the email body and pastes it in a new note with a link to the message (in Bear or Craft) but forwarding the email is much smoother.
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I would actually prefer to use Evernote still, but years ago my work blocked it. I don’t get cell reception where I work, so I rely on Wi-Fi. I might even still use EN, but I found their local syncing of notebooks to still be unreliable.
Hi, if you are interested in returning to paid Personal level Evernote (not Pro level) for $69.99 per year, here is a link (I use this link every year to save the $20 and it has worked; worth making a note of it.) Compare plans and get started for free | Evernote
The web clipper is unparalleled. Has anyone found one as good anywhere?
The MarkDownload extension was suggested and has versions for chrome and safari. So far it works better than I expected.
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Yes, because the data are all visible. While I use both dataview and kanban a lot I can still read, edit and understand my notes without the plugins.
I don’t consier the possibility that images or other files left behind in a delete is a disaster. Partially because many of mine are linked in multiple places so deleting them automatically would be a disaster. Now I can see a potential use for the last delete with an option to say these other things are linked do you want to delete them too? But I can also find out a lot of that by looking at orphan notes so it’s not a big deal for me.
If you want to clip just the text & primary images from pages, try Notion. It is, IMO, almost identical to EN. And there is Instapaper, which usually does slightly better but can’t be edited like Notion.
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Being someone who joined Evernote back in the Dark Ages (pre-2010) and left a few years ago for DT, I wanted to share this from Tiago Forte, published just today.
He is still using Evernote and while he only touches on it in this video, I was a little surprised this would be his app of choice. Perhaps he is less shiny object oriented than me (not difficult).
Anyway, thought it would be worth posting here. I think this video kicks off a series that will explore these apps more.
It also made me think that @MacSparky and @ismh86 might have him on the show (or did I miss that episode?)
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