Substantial changes afoot for NotePlan. (“A note-taking app for pros where tasks are first-class citizens and daily notes are tightly integrated with your calendar and reminders.”)
Markdown based notes, integrates with iCloud Calendar and Reminders, Mac and iOS, and “Bullet Journal and Zettelkasten are naturally supported.”
V.3 will become a $60/yr subscription app, which along with its price will limit appeal, but I can see pros living inside the app for calendar-based notes as well as general notes and reminders.
That’s cool. It’s pricey but it’s a notes app, a Reminders app, a task manager, and can (somewhat clunkily) display calendar entries too. I like to make detailed notes for myself in my reminders, and things like the Notes field in Todoist are terrible, so something like this update is intriguing.
I own NotePlan 2 but never liked having the calendar be the largest, main, central column - v.3’s focus on notes was the right move.
$60 / year is a reach – considering the heart of the app is linking a note to a date. I’ve used v2 for several years, and v3 throughout the beta. I am not enthusiastic about continuing. I like individual notes – txt is fine, md would be good – but there’s no compelling reason to use NotePlan in order to have a linked collection of notes.
Agenda is the same idea (albeit with a database instead of external text files) and for my tastes does a nice integration with calendars and reminders. And Agenda is $35 for the premium features – no need to reenroll for premium in order to keep the feature releases. Otherwise, Agenda is free.
Agreed, and I’ve been communicating with the developer for weeks that I believe the subscription price point is unrealistic. He’s committed to it however, so I suppose we shall see.
That’s too bad. I spent a total of $13 on NotePlan v.1 and the v.2 upgrade, and I’m not even using it, so I’m not considering a $60/yr subscription.
Between making note editor the central view, the addition of folders, week-view (which I live in in Todoist) and timeblocking it’s a very capable upgrade with needed features.
The updates are worth something, but I’m not sure what.
Interesting, er, strategy “focus will be on the AppStore to boost the rankings”. Not sure what that has to do with “rankings”, apart from the reality of “I net $42 from Apple the first year, and I net a fraction of that from SetApp”.
Yes, maybe the dev needs the revenue and decided to try first to grab as many subscriptions now (whose revenue will double to the dev after a year as Apple drops its take from 30% to 15%). Or maybe Setapp’s revenue sharing is partly based on reviews and ratings? A number of apps departed Setapp (eg Diarly, Polarr, Pixa, Blogo, Flume plus nearly a dozen more) and I always wondered if they jumped or were pushed.
Yes! I didn’t do the needed math. At any rate, although we don’t know the split for devs under Setapp, if NotePlan was able to remain inside the program they clearly believe that the lesser volume of App Store subscription revenue still beats whatever their cut would have been among the 200 apps inside Setapp… even with the additional revenue from people adding the iOS app plan.
I think v.2 is actually robust, especially with added Markdown rendering, nested tagging, Calendar/Reminders integration, and saved filters. It’s progressed nicely, and fairly quickly, even with limitations wrt attachments (partially addressed in v.2) and the lack of folders. I loved that it is fast when taking notes (I type erratically but really fast). Other apps, like Agenda, seemed to lag a bit when I typed.
FYI at the beginning of the year Andrew Canion from Down Under wrote a brief comparison between NotePlan and Agenda, and called them “both great, and both infuriating” - I tend to agree, even as I found some neat tricks for NotePlan (like draging-dropping files onto NotePlan inserts an absolute link to the file).
I guess for me the calendar part of the app was not as important as the notetaking part, but that seems to have been ameliorated in v.3. Too bad the subscription pricing seems a bit out of whack.
Thanks, that’s a good short writeup and straight to the point. I’ve purchased Agenda as well and sticking with it rather than using NotePlan. Associating data (bi-directional) in Agenda is bit of a challenge. Obsidian is an app that I really like but struggle to get that into my workflow. Plus I have too many apps, a lot of similar ones which in a way allow me to choose the best ones that suit me. Exploring Hook to help with my workflow. MPU is a great site to learn, albeit sometimes dig myself into another hole buying yet another app after some positive comments on it
