My experimentation with Notes as an alternative to EN was short lived. While I’ve enjoyed the change in UI using Apple Notes (both Mac and iOS), I’ve encountered a few insurmountable problems. Truth be told, I’m not sure my attraction to the UI was due to truly novel differences or simply a change of scenery. May be the latter!
Quite simply there are 2 key issues that will keep me from moving from EN:
Poor conversion of notes
Many notes converted “good enough”, but many lost enough formatting that the integrity of the note was lost. Many of the problem notes that I spot checked were notes that were created via the “Email to Evernote” feature. With close to 4,000 notes I’m not going to check integrity of each note. This alone is a deal killer, at least for a complete move from EN to Apple Notes.
I’ll deal with this for now. However, this one is worrisome as it just underscores the difficulty of getting data out of EN.
Lack of search support in 3rd party search clients
I rely heavily on search. Apple Notes are not individually indexed in the Spotlight index. As such, external search tools (eg, HoudahSpot or Alfred search) do not work. Dividing my search workflow across 2 search tools makes no sense.
I contemplated “point forward” migration. That is, don’t convert the old and start new in Apple Notes. Migrate away over time. The search issue killed that idea, too. Splitting my notes across 2 apps is only feasible if I can do a simple search across both. This is not an option.
Other observations…
While not as significant, through this experiment I realized how much I depend on “Email to Evernote". I haven’t been able to come up with a suitable workaround that is not really clumsy and inefficient.
I was able to cobble together suitable web clipper replacements for use with Apple Notes on both Mac (thank you Keyboard Maestro) and iOS (Workflow/Shortcuts).
I was also able to replicate most other EN workflows of mine (many Alfred or Hazel based) using AppleScript and Workflow/Shortcuts for iOS. It was fun to build these and I’ve enjoyed the thought problem of “could I move off EN”.
Though, for the simple reasons above, I’m going to hang out in EN for the time being… – jay