I may need to create a note, edit one, or view one. All equal possibilities.
In terms of what I’d land on, I’d say I’ll probably stick with EN until they implode or raise their price again. Viable solutions for me have to have a balance between looking good, working the way I think, and some other subjective things like what I deem to be a reliable sync engine or acceptable way to store my data. This of course, varies person to person.
With UpNote the notes aren’t encrypted and it seems like there’s one person running the whole show. That’s a turn off for me. Apple Notes is okay but the functionality is a bit limited and the word on the street (people on this forum, podcasts I listen to) is that Apple Notes isn’t a place to store life and death information. It just can’t be trusted.
I think if I were to move today, I’d go with Bear or Craft (using iCloud storage, not Craft servers) to replace Evernote. They’re graphically pleasing, have teams looking after them, and seem to work quite well – though no web interface for Bear is a deal breaker.
I find it funny how we all (myself included) do a little mental gymnastics when we look at must haves for certain apps. For whatever reason, I don’t trust Apple Notes. So a feature that it lacks may be totally unacceptable for me, yet while using another app that also lacks that feature, I might be okay with it. We’re weird creatures, aren’t we?
OK, I’ll rise to the challenge, here’s how I do that in Obsidian now.
Take all the pix, if I wanted them to go directly to Obsidian from my phone I’d have to modify one of my existing shortcuts I use to create notes with pictures as part of my biosecurity logs. The modification would be to accept multiple pictures and store the resulting note in a different folder from my logging folder. I would use my Obsidian Inbox so that I could link that note in the place it belongs, under the Equipment header in my Reference MOC note before moving it to it’s final location in my main catchall folder in Obsidian. BTW My existing shortcut does accept both spoken and typed input as well as pictures so there are options for how you get the data in.
I don’t know about the scannable app, I still use my ancient ScanSnap S510M on my desktop mac to scan things to PDFs. I just drag them into Obsidian directly. If I drag them into a note they are automatically included. So I’d drag my scanned file into the new note in the inbox with pix and voila, the complete note is created. Doing that on mobile is probably the only bit of difficulty but I’m sure you could work out something with Shortcuts and Actions for Obsidian to get it to embed the link to the PDF in the note.
Final step for me would be to make a few links in other notes so I can find that note again easily and move it to my big folder but you could combine those steps so that it goes directly to the final physical location. I mentioned adding it to my giant Reference note but I’d also probably put links in the note for the SUV (I have one for all of our major pieces of equipment, car, trucks, tractors, skidsteers, excavators, side-by-sides and more so I assume you’d have one for your vehicles too.)
In fact, I am thinking of writing a similar shortcut that will fill out a template of info and also accept pictures as I document special items in the house. It’s on the list of things I want to work on but not for a few weeks. If I get it done I’ll see if I can figure out how to share it.
I do a version of this in Obsidian as well. I have a dedicated vault where I store all my photography-related research and reference materials, which are, as one might expect, image and attachment heavy.
Example: Lecture notes from the various photography courses I take. First I create a folder for the lecture in question. I then create three subfolders: one for images; one for screenshots, handouts, slides, and assigned reading and/or media (videos, podcasts, etc); and one for markdown notes. (Aside: I create these ahead of time in Finder so that they’re ready to go in Obsidian when the course begins.) After the lecture, I drop any images or handouts into their respective folders. I then create a markdown note that contains the notes I took in class. I drop the images from the image folder directly into the note wherever they are relevant—e.g., if the instructor uses a photo by, say, Diane Arbus to illustrate a point they’re making, I’ll insert a jpg of the image into that section of my notes. If the instructor uses slides, I’ll drop a PDF of it into the relevant point in my lecture notes, etc., etc, etc. Notes I’ve taken from that week’s assigned reading go into the folder of markdown notes.
In source mode, it looks like a markdown note with lots of links to attachments. In preview mode, it looks like a nicely formatted document with images and links to any related material. Another aside: this works equally well in Notebooks, which @dque referenced above. I think Notebooks is superior to Obsidian on iOS/ipadOS, and it has a prettier UI. I like it a lot, even though I spend more time in Obsidian these days.
I do something similar with the materials related to my gear.
Yes, this is definitely a roll-your-own version of the kind of note one can create in Evernote, Apple Notes, and (I think) Craft. It takes some up-front investment to get things set up, but I prefer local-first apps that let me store my stuff directly in Finder folders.
When I’m in a videoconference meeting or lecture, I’ll often use Command + Control + Shift + 4 to grab screenshots of the visuals being shown and then Command + v them into the meeting or lecture note I’m taking in Obsidian.
Same! Obsidian is for research and learning; DevonTHINK is for administrative archives; DevonTHINK is also for indexing my Obsidian vaults and the folders that contain my collection of reference materials (e.g., PDFs, ePubs, etc.). I’ve started using shared Apple Notes for “household” user manuals, parts numbers, paint colors, etc. (I picked this up from the MPU episode on Apple Notes that I almost didn’t listen to because I don’t use Apple Notes much.)
Bear’s tagging system does allow for folders, although not as one might traditionally think of them. What made this click for me in the brain was discovering Bear’s implementation of nested tags (which is not a feature that I have seen in other apps, to the best of my knowledge). Bear has good documentation on this point: How to use tags in Bear
To give a concrete example, I have previously used packing lists for trips that I have taken stored in Bear. Each of these listed are tagged as follows: #personal/travel/packing lists#. In the sidebar, there is (essentially) a personal “folder”, with a travel “folder” nested inside of it, and a “packing lists” folder nested inside of it in turn.
Of course, what makes this not a true folder is that I could add a second tag to any note, and that tag would place the note into a second “folder” elsewhere. To me, that’s a feature, not a bug, but I can understand if that might not work for someone.
The key that has made Bear work for me is a simple rule: every note gets a tag. This forces me to make sure that everything I create gets put into the bespoke file system that I have created within Bear, making it easier for me to find things later where I might expect them to be.
For the scenario you mentioned, I actually use an inventory/Home management app called Homer.
I can take pictures of all the codes, stickers, and receipts. The app does a search online and finds and files the associated manuals and help pages etc. It also lets me track warranties for all purchases. Has lots of cool features.
As for apps that do good notes and pictures you can try Agenda. I use it extensively for work and save all sorts of diagrams and screenshots in it.
Yes, it does. I haven’t tried it out as I don’t need e2e encryption for what I use Craft for (and native syncing is incredibly fast and deals with changes promptly), and some have reported on Slack and elsewhere that using external sync locations is not always entirely reliable, but it is supposed to work.
Of particular interest is point #10 - turn off “optimize storage”, which I guess makes sense.
I have used their iCloud sync in the past and never had any issues, but I suppose this does put it into “less reliable sync” territory if you believe my posts about Apple Notes not being reliable from just a day or so ago.
You can put an external location (in a folder) wherever you like. If you put it in an iCloud folder (e.g. Documents) it will sync via iCloud. I guess it would work with Dropbox or OneDrive or other services too, but Craft only knows “sync state” with the Craft service and makes it clear that looking after external locations is at user risk.
My experience was that using an iCloud folder for Craft was significantly slower than the (very fast) Craft sync. Over many months it was reliable in the sense that I never lost anything or got out of sync, but I couldn’t rely on anything newish being synced to other devices by the time I needed it. You can’t share or publish from external locations either. If you don’t need sync (e.g. just on your mac) it works fine. In the end I didn’t have anything sensitive enough to worry too much about encryption and no longer have any external locations. The craft servers have always been rock solid and fast. I do back up manually to Textbundle once a week (which then gets backed up to Time Machine etc.) just in case.
Yes, I think other sync services work. That said, only iCloud works with mobile. If you want to sync across devices and to your phone, I think iCloud is the only option.
The rate of nontrivial improvements and feature additions has really accelerated since Bear 2 went public last year. And Bear 2 itself is a complete rebuild – it represents at least as much improvement and refinement as most other apps see cumulatively over many years.
Bear is still much more about a highly polished and refined experience than an overflow of “features,” but I don’t think it’s fair to call their pace of development glacial. They just focus (much) more on refinement, and in the past have kept major changes in-house longer before releasing them publicly. They now have open betas that are gaining features at a much quicker pace, like the new Quick Open, for example.
I’ve been an Evernote user since 2008, but concerned about the major price increases recently and where Bending Spoons is heading. I also never liked “stacks” and prefer a real folder structure. I’ve used pretty much every app discussed here, and recently made the move to Apple Notes.
It’s not perfect, but it is quite good. Part of the “push” for getting deeper into Apple Notes are the recent strong endorsements by both MacSparky and Stephen. It has a lot of similar functionality to Evernote, though I get if you need Windows capability, it’s a no go. It’s interesting to hear about the sync concerns. I have found Notes sync to be almost instantaneous (Evernote is now better, but still not as fast, and Devonthink sync, imho, is poor). Also, Evernote has a limit of 250mb/ note. I sometimes want to put a video clip that is larger into a note. Apple Notes does this easily, and can then play it directly in the note.
I suspect Apple will continue to improve Notes with the next OS upgrade.
Agenda doesn’t seem to slow down with hundreds of notes in a project folder. It also looks like I can put many different assets into a single note in a project.
Most articles that I don’t need for work, simply go into the file system.
But I’ve started using Bear 2 again (only on the Mac) as a web clipper. After I clip, I go back to the main article, grab the author and the date of publication, take out most of the pictures if they aren’t graphs, and then export them as text bundles. I then import them into Agenda.
This seems to work although it’s a little clunky. I’m only planning on doing this process once a week.
I use DT for this. As others have mentioned, I have a database specifically for all this life debris that seems to accumulate. I have really detailed folders in it (in your scenario it would be e.g. 03. Car > Accessories > Roof box.
I do this so everything can be navigated quickly and easily.
Even for stuff like recurring Apple subs for an app, I have a folder per app. If I get news updates that are important, or speak to customer service, it all gets filed in the app folder (I’m sharing that because I used to just have an “iTunes” folder way back when, but it was hard to navigate and being really specific with folders made this much easier.)
I don’t really have any friction with this. I just drag and drop whatever file type it is (email, PDF, etc) into the folder in DT. I rarely even rename the files unless I really need to.
I like everything about Apple Notes except that there’s no good, built in export. The Exporter app works pretty well, but it’s not by Apple and could disappear at any point. I’ve already cut’n’pasted all my notes out of Apple Notes once and damned if I’m going to do it again!
