This should be asked on our forums.
I was able to add my license. ![]()
I have not. I would if I intended to keep using DT, but Iâll probably find a different workflow. Iâd rather not be faced with a $100/year upgrade cost. I donât begrudge the developers; they need and deserve income to keep DT updated. Iâd pay it if I used it extensively for academic or professional research, but I donât. I use it for research related to blog articles and a few white papers. That doesnât warrant a $100/year cost. ![]()
The Archive https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ sounds like it may fit what you are looking for. It is a spiritual successor to Notational Velocity, designed to quickly capture notes of any size and make them extremely easy to find again. Its search is lightning-quick and accurate.
Iâve raised several issues on the forums and sometimes via direct tickets over the years
Just a friendly reminder to all of us, we sometimes fall into tech support or customer service questions that are best served by directly contacting the software vendor.
I know a few vendors are here too and will try to be helpful, so on their behalf I want to remind us that they are also trying to be respectful and not usurp resources and focus of a 3rd party forum to handle their own product issues.
So keep that mind, I think they arenât trying to deflect or be evasive when they ask that specific product or support questions be re-directed to their own forums or customer service systems.
Decided to give NotePlan a whirl. I find meeting notes sit in a weird place for me. I have notes related to Projects (in the GTD meaning of that word) and I have notes related to Meetings. Then I have the kind of notes where you just need to scribble something down quickly.
For Projects, I just keep a md file in the same folder as the rest of the Project Support material. For quick capture, Drafts is unbeatable. But the notes related to meetings thing is a bit of a pain.
I canât keep it in with my agenda and business papers, as these are often stored on drives shared with others. I donât want to create a convoluted folder structure of meeting titles and dates that I have to maintain, just for meeting notes where I might only write down one sentence.
While it does notes for any purpose, linking notes to calendar items is Noteplanâs big selling point, so Iâm hoping it scratches that itch for me.
I was unaware that Coeur dâAlene, Idaho is German territory. If anything, I thought we had our eyes on the Spanish island of Mallorca as a seventh state.
Anyway. I think you might have a look on Notebooks. It does note taking and linking but is more lightweight and less feature rich than Devonthink. It does not create databases and works on the normal file structure (and creates a bunch of plist files). I also found the developer helpful and responsive.
Another really big selling point of NotePlan is its ability to treat tasks like calendar entries.
I can take any task and drag it to another calendar day; I can either select âmoveâ or âlinkâ. Donât have to set up another file first before you drag because that happens in the background. Then you can drag tasks around in the day to order them.
You can also take a task and schedule it for another day.
NotePlan is the first note app Iâve used that has no discernible pain points in my usage. $0.24/day is cheap for the utility and productivity NotePlan gives me.
DEVONtechnologies
, the company behind DEVONthink, is a virtual company with a main presence/headquarters listed in Coeur dâAlene, Idaho, USA, but also maintains a presence in Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany, with a globally distributed team working from home offices.
- US Address (Main): P.O. Box 96, Coeur dâAlene, ID 83816, USA
- German Address: GroĂingersheimer StraĂe 21, 74321 Bietigheim-Bissingen, DE
- Structure: They operate as a virtual company with employees working from various locations worldwide, leveraging flexible work arrangements.
I read many positive comments about Craft, I have used it a bit but I do not really see what all of the fuss is about. Am I missing something?
I like Apple Notes for all of the reasons mentioned but the ability to search requires more effort than one would expect. Even when I enter the exact title of the note it still returns many other notes that you have to wade thru to find the one that you are looking for.
Organizing the folders to show in the side bar in the order that you want requires a bit of Maint.
Using a Table of Contents Note is a OK work around but not ideal.
Apple canât seem to commit to making Tags truly useful, for example when you go to assign a tag they do not alphabetize the tags to make them easy to find.
I have about 7,500 note and Exporter was able to quickly export them.
I need to see just how fast and easily HoudhaSpo can find what t need to find.
I do love how DevonThink is able to import Apple Notes.
I am going to try and restart DevonThink using DevonThink with V4
I have found that loading the DT manuals and the Take Control book into ChatGPT and then ask questions to config it this time around .
Donât forget DT Field Guide. It is still applicable even if itâs written for DT 3.
Craftâs a block-based system which does not really offer any benefits with a short âjot something downâ type of note, but is extremely powerful when you have, for example, research notes that you are trying to organise and can easily drag points around, group and ungroup them into sub-pages, hive off sections into new documents and so on. Itâs pretty much instant and intuitive. Add to that some attractive and easy to use styling (so you can show a sub-page in your main document as various kinds of âcardâ or use âwashi typeâ to divide sections or use backgrounds etc. to theme some kinds of notes); easy and reliable attachments and images; code and equation blocks; daily notes; tasks; links and backlinks etc.etcâŚ
Everything syncs very fast and reliably (havenât lost a byte of data since the beginning) and any document can instantly be shared as a web page or for collaboration and just as easily unshared again. There are tools to create âcollectionsâ (a bit like but not the same as Notion databases)
Itâs still in very rapid development with recent efforts integrating a choice of AI assistants, including MCP and an API to allow you to build your integrations.
Like a lot of start-ups it has tended to refocus its efforts as the company has grown, and the feature list is very long as a result, but itâs perfectly possible to use it as simply as a collection of attractive, well-structured personal notes working within minutes or develop a complex team or family information system, without it appearing to be nerdy or require technical skills.
Not for everyone, but itâs really very good indeed.
Youâre description of use cases for Craft is good â thank you. I enjoy using Craft more than any other app in the dock, but my use is limited to a few specific domains. For travel planning, travel journaling, preparing book overviews for my book clubs, and for nature notes. In most of these cases, I make extensive use of Craftâs publishing feature to share these documents with others.
Katie
Bear in mind that the discounted upgrade price is only available if you have a current active licence. So youâll pay more per year if you let it lapse and then upgrade than if you keep your licence active.
Craft is my most used up and has become indispensable. It has just enough formatting built in to do anything I need. Itâs great for preparing notes and then teaching from your iPad. You can use it to build a wiki. You can keep daily notes and you can add dates to your notes that will link to the dayâs note in the calendar view. You can publish pages online. It has an excellent UI and you can style the content to your hearts content. It also has a very helpful AI that can query text or summarise.
I use it for research, writing sermons, preparing teaching, planning rotas, keeping project support material and publishing short term documents for different groups.
Thank you for alerting me to this. I was not aware of that stipulation. ![]()
I hadnât realised that was the case either. And the price to pick up a new license is $200 by the looks of things for a further 12 months, twice the upgrade price? Thatâs pretty steep. I paid less than that for 4 years of updates of DT3. $99 per year is already a doubling of my annualised price.
Presumably their intention is to incentivise people to keep upgrading, which is good in theory, but I canât help but feel theyâre actually creating a barrier for people returning. If I âpauseâ my upgrades, so to speak, Iâm far less likely to return if Iâm penalised for doing so.
Its a bit like when you see something on sale for a long time, when the price returns to normal, the regular price then feels expensive.
Iâm on the fence about DT at the mo, and I was thinking of doing a bit like what @Bmosbacker had floated, just using it without an upgrade for a while, see how it goes. Instead, this makes me think its a binary choice between upgrading next summer or getting rid entirely. I donât see myself ever wanting to pay $200 just to renew my upgrade pathway.
If you are referring to upgrading from DEVONthink 3 to 4 with the same edition, e.g., DEVONthink 3 Pro to 4 Pro, it is not $200.
https://www.devontechnologies.com/apps/devonthink/pricing
et al:
Everyone ultimately decides what they want to use and we are not in the habit of trying to coerce or cajole anyone into upgrading. You decide if itâs worth it or not. But make sure youâre reading the correct information directly from us and hopefully make your decision based on actual experience with the application, not the opinions of others. The trial period is still as generous as it always was, so you have plenty of time to test it for yourself (ideally on a second macOS account).
PS: Anecdotally, I find it interesting how many people are not only purchasing multi-year extensions up front, but also how many individuals now moving to the Server edition.