It’s a good program but I’ve been bitten by iCloud too many times to trust it. Today I only use it to annotate PDFs and take notes on my iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. When complete I immediately export the document via the Share Sheet and delete it from AN.
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Ooh…that looks interesting! Thanks!
That’s exactly what drew me to UpNote was the HTML export and local storage
I can relate with much of what you say.
However, I struggle with Apple Notes despite so much wanting to be able to rely on it.
I don’t particularly like Evernote but it does a good job of organising my random collection of notes, while AN feels like a huge box of scrunched up pieces of paper.
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I switched back to Alfred from Raycast for the same reason, on my weak old Intel MacBook Air Raycast was a little bit heavy and Alfred is instant, I even wonder how this launcher can run so fast on such a weak machine for which even playing video at 1080p is very serious task and for Spotlight, sometimes it takes about five seconds to load the results.
Have you looked at Agenda? It allows for fast note-taking and you can create reminders and calendar events from within the app: from within a note even with a few easy keystrokes. (Your fingers need never leave the keyboard.)
Like a lot of people, I both wanted an app that would readily fit the way I work. I already use Devonthink for almost everything I used to use Evernote for: web capture, writing small documents, viewing PDFs. It does it all. But it felt rather clunky when it came to daily, meeting, and brainstorming notes. Agenda feels right for that and lets me interact with Reminders and Calendar.
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I am finding that. I have DEVONthink 3, I am known as a fan boy and you what, I am. I am used to it now too. All kinds of obscure capacities, userful to me but probably few others I found over the years, including some Keyboard Maestro snippets and short cuts for it.
As you say, recent experiments have not been worth the learning curve. That seems to be where I am. Oddly enough sometimes that pays off indirectly too, I hung on with Ulysses, not getting much use out of it, now with their new LaTeX function, it is a power app for me. Had I not already owned it, I probably wouldn’t have known about it or noticed any heads up here about it. Who knows!?
Agree with Raycast to Alfred and that’s what I did a few months ago after trying out Rc.
You are missing out a lot sticking to AN though. UpNote is excellent! You might want to give it a try.
What do you think is missing with AN?
I’ve long felt that AN is underappreciated and that people assume it’s still in the AN of 2015 era. It now has attachment support, OCR, annotations, quick notes, sharing and collaboration, tags, smart folders, note locking, and soon the ability to link notes. It’s remarkably capable for an app that is still lightning fast.
The only things I’m missing out on IMO are more advanced export and backups or version control. I don’t really need more than that, but other people have different needs. I keep coming back to this meme:
I struggle everytime I try to use more advanced apps like Obsidian and cobbling together complex workflows, shortcuts, & plugins that seem to break with every OS release. Some people like tinkering and finding solutions that work for them, and others probably do find AN lacking for what they need it to do. But I’d argue most people wouldn’t miss out on AN.
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The ability to link notes bidirectionally is the main thing for me.
Other features missing in AN besides what you noted:
- not multi-platform
- no automatic daily notes + the ability to reference dates in the past/future that automatically creates notes for the linked note
- does not support object types (like Capacities or Anytype)
- no nested tags (like in Bear 2)
- not possible to publish selective notes to the web
- no official web clipper
- no tabs, detachable sticky note window
- no/hardly any say in product features/development as the devs are not reachable
- no notebooks or collections (not the same as folders or tags)
- no toggles, no rich website previews, no YouTube embeds, no PDF embeds, no highlighting and other advanced text formatting
- no native support for templates
- and the list goes on…
UpNote is equally fast as AN despite being a 3rd party electron app. It is remarkable.
How can UpNote be so freaking fast? Which language was it written with?
Additional features !== complexity or mediocrity w.r.t app stability.
I wish more people discover UpNote and see how amazing it is. This is my main recommendation.
Personally, I use Capacities though since it is better for my needs. But it’s not something I generally advise for most.
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- no native way to export your data without tinkering or third party apps (so technically one is locked in to Apple Notes) (this is a major red flag for me, I made that mistake once with OneNote years ago and am not repeating it again with Apple Notes)
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I will never store my notes on people’s servers where they can technically read my notes.
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Well … I’ve gone w-a-a-a-y back to the 90s when I could put my document files in the directory of my choosing. (But not so far as to give up drag-and-drop in favor of the macOS equivalent of the DOS prompt …) Oh, and on the storage medium of my choosing. So let’s say a long familiar manner of managing files rather than an app per se.
To the extent I can, I’m moving away from apps that rename my files and bury them in the Library, lock them up in a proprietary database, or store them in someone else’s cloud by default.
So. I use Obsidian for notes rather than Apple Notes because for me knowing where the notes ARE is simpler.
I do make exceptions—Readwise Reader, for example, although in that case any of the ePubs or PDFs that I upload there also live on a physical drive attached to my Mac or on my Mac’s hard drive.
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I’ve been using iCloud Drive for the last 2-3 years and all in all has been reliable. I have found recently though sharing access to certain folders to my wife is buggy and troublesome.
Contemplating Dropbox but annoying as my needs aren’t that complex so paying for storage isn’t something I want to do.
We have just received permission to build our own house so that’s a project which will bring a few of these issues out.
FTR, I gave up on Agenda (see above) and returned to using Devonthink, and I eventually switched from documents IN Devonthink to documents INDEXED by Devonthink. Devonthink maintains a place in my routine because it makes it so easy to create RTF and markdown documents on the fly and to save things from the web (as RTF or markdown).
In the end, I’m just a guy who likes to see his files in the Finder and open them. So that’s mostly what I do.
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Frankly with DEVONthink 3, Keyboard Maestro and BBEdit a few other apps the learning curve with anything else now means it isn’t worth my time really. I used to try apps out for ‘fun’ really and settled to my current set a few years ago, I still try something now and again, maybe a text editor or bibliography, it rarely goes far even if I like or think the app is good. I have even paid after a trial period on that basis. Well done ‘tip jar’ kind of thing.
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Have been ready to start Apple Notes since early 2022 following Evernote, Notion, Bear and Craft. At that time there was no links, highlighters and some functions. Search should be more instant than Evernote but especially since iOS 17 not all results are shown. Even though I tried to use Bear and even Evernote, and concern about no official export has been rising, I have no determination to leave AN.
But if I have serious writing, I start using iA Writer at the same time for further editing and backup. Manual way but beneficial.
on a mac, i use keynote and Typst for documents, xcode and CotEditor for code. productivty apps don’t make me productive.
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May I ask you how you use Keynote for documents?
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