As I said above, I do not have iA Writer (or Obsidian) so I cannot confirm for you. But I use Pages, Excel, Numbers, and ByWord frequently to work with files that are contained by âimportâ, not âindexed toâ. All I can say is if you have iA Writer, DEVONthink ToGo, and/or Obsidian on your iOS devices ⌠try. No need to add the complexity of indexing when a very reliable way is using imported files is already there. Hope it works for you.
Iâm pretty confident iA Writer will work just fine. I noticed when i tried Obsidian that it has âvaultsâ (not sure what they are as I did not pursue the appp) and I donât know if Obsidian conforms to the normal iOS way of working with files stored in other apps.
Like I suggested, try. Perhaps with Obsidian, if you do not yet have DEVONthink ToGo, try to use Obsidian on files inside other iOS apps. Browse for them. If it does not work, check with Obsidian how to use in the normal iOS way to access files in other appsâ iOS âsandboxesâ.
I totally agree with what @iPersuade said about âsignificant changesâ. This happened to me couple of times I gave up trying to make it sync. I actually thought I had lost all my notes, but couple of hours later, I opened Notes on my iPhone and everything was in tact.
This also seems to be consistent with file sync via iCloud TBH.
Unfortunately, after two days and what I described above, Notes on the MBP will not even sync a single note to iCloud. I would like to think after two days it would start working.
Thanks, Iâll experiment on the iPad to see how this works. One thing I do know having used DT quite a bit, its editor is bad on both the Mac and iOS.
2 days is a while I guess. The max it took my Notes or even Photos was 36 hours.
What I would suggest is to take weekly backups, via Time Machine or another app. Thatâs what I do and it keeps me away from thinking about losing the Notes.
The thing is migrating to another app, setting it perfectly to work as per our workflow and getting used to it takes a few days. Also, it breaks a few automationsâŚall of this is time consuming which is why I just use Notes. This has happened 2-3 times in the past 18 months so not a big deal. I just use universal clipboard to copy paste the note to another device, not desirable but works in the moment.
Well, weâre going to have to disagree on that. I use them all the time. Do these editors have the same features as more sophisticated editors? No. Do they do a good job most the time? Yes. Would I write a book with them? Certainly not. Can you mostly just ignore them and use whatever other editor you want? Probably (if the other editor conforms to the norms of macOS and iOS).
Devonthink to go allows apps to âopen in placeâ and obsidian does not due this. Apps like 1writer/iawriter etc do. To use DTTG with obsidian you can index the files from obsidian to DTTG, but there are sync errors and the database needs to be cleaned frequently. It doesnât work well if using more than one device honestly.
Since your workflow (like mine) highly relies on pdf markup via devonthink on iPad, I would consider just using DTTG for iOS too.
To get around not having templates in obsidian I use âphrase expressâ app keyboard on iOS for my templated meeting notes (rather than copy and paste a full document, which you could do). Also I like having an âinboxâ document and âreading notesâ and itâs actually quite easy to make a shortcut on iOS to make addendums (happy to share if it would help someone, but click shortcut, opens top window and dictate or type text, hit ok and in background I have it add a line, date and time and my note to my âinboxâ note).
Edit:
Should also mention you can easily make a link to a whole folder (not just a file), which might make your life a bit easier with some of the projects with multiple pdf and notes? (Envisioning putting the link to the DTTG group in reminders so you would open up to all your documents/annotations etc
Omg I agree so much. They are ridiculously badâŚbut is slowly getting better. It wonât ever be obsidian, but obsidian wonât ever have the PDF options or search that DT does.
You could open any file within DTTG with a third party app, as long as the third party app is using the Apple Filesystem-Dialog to do so!
I would not recommend to work with indexed files within Devonthink, if there are no really important reasons for that, who are more important than the reasons for import vs. indexing.
Apple Tech. Support is âescalatingâ support up the chain. I suspect Iâll be sending them logs and screen recordings. I appreciate the support but boy, it is taking A LOT of my time to just get AN on the MBP to sync to iCloud. What a hassle.
I was just giving Apple Notes (AN) a test run by importing a few notes from Bear into the app to see how I like AN. The thing I quickly realized though is that there is no way to export multiple notes OUT of AN. With Bear, you can export your whole notes library in that app with a few clicks - AND it gives you multiple different output formatting options (TXT, MD, PDF, HTML, etc.). Only method with AN is to export notes one by one as a PDFs - not ideal. Trying to lock you in. Uncool.
As an aside, I too, follow your app adventures with great interest! They mirror my own struggles.
Re: your struggle. Noting the pricey subscription, I wonder if NotePlan might be a good option, since you could keep your Reminders architecture and the only thing would be switching your notes app â since you already have everything exported into markdown documents anyway via Exporter, I bet the setup would be relatively seamless. That said, itâs $$$$.
What I canât tell by your description of how you use the task manager is if there is a sequential or dependent requirement for your tasks for your projects. By that I mean do you not want to see any other tasks until certain ones are finished?
Also, how do your define seamlessly getting emails into a task manager? Dragging, a hot key or shortcut or what?
Answers to those questions would affect my suggestions.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I routinely open âforeignâ documents from within Obsidian in my app of choice. PDFs are my most comon one I open but I also open LibreOffice files on occasion.
This too is contrary to my use. I have a large group of various Obsidian templates I use for all different types of notes. So Iâm not understanding what you mean when you say Obsidian doesnât have templates.
Open in place refers to hitting share in DTTG and opening say a pdf in the app âpdf viewerâ or âhighlightsâ and then when closing it has edited the pdf in devonthink. Normal share sheet from apps is share button actually copies to the other app. As others have suggested you can open devonthink files from Apple files too, but the open in place is more seamless.
And with templates I was referencing that obsidian does that well and DTTG not so much, so DTTG needs the workaround.
Edit:
while you can open external files from obsidian (didnât know you could on mobile), you canât use obsidian easily to organize/share/tag without plugins or making a note with the pdf added to it. Devonthink allows all files regardless of type to be labeled etc and still use the powerful search on desktop. Just a different way of doing things.
OK Obsidian opens PDFs within Obsidian by default but you can open in an app via share but you are correct, it copies the file into the other PDF ap p and doesnât send the annotations you make there back to the Obsidian copy.
True, but then again in my use case PDFs that are in Obsidian are ALREADY linked or embedded into notes or have a note attached somehow. I wouldnât want Obsidian or any other app for that matter to actually change the PDF files. I always keep an original copy and an annotated copy. But I also typically use Zotero for the connectiosn into Obsidian not directly as most of my PDFs that I need to reference and annotate are scientific papers. Other PDFs I use in Obsidian are read only, the built in PDF viewer in Obsidian is more than enough (plane tickets, flight or hotel info etc.)
Oh wow. Had not known about the Exporter app. Just found it in App Store and gave it a test run - worked like a charm! That absolutely addresses the one glaring issue I had with AN. Will now continue to give it a test run and see if it is a worthy FREE replacement for Bear.
However, the way AN handles font size and font style is unbelievably archaic. They donât provide any app specific controls! You need to set font size in the global settings. And when you import notes, you have to go to each individual paragraph to âclassifyâ it as BODY text. This is brutal. It clearly does not handle MarkDown text well.
I use Obsidian + Things. Things is expensive, but they DO NOT have a subscription. I mainly use Obsidian because it is plain text and therefore not locked into using that app forever. Even though it is using iCloud to sync the files, Iâve never had a problem with iCloud syncing a folder full of files.
I did have some relatively minor problems syncing in Apple Notes over the years, but it was frequent enough to lose my confidence in the app.
I back up all of my files three ways: 1) continuous backup via BackBlaze 2) a backup to a home external drive and 3) a backup to an office external drive. These backups include a monthly export of all of Apple Notes to a notes archive folder using Exporter. Consequently, Iâm not worried about losing notes. The problem is that I need my notes to be reliably synced across my devices because I do the heavy lifting on my MBP but most of the meeting note writing, etc., on the iPad.
