There were some posts last June that peaked my interest in SnipNotes. Many of us have expressed interest in finding that “ultimate notes app”, if not the holy grail, at least a workflow game changer. @bowline spoke highly of the SnipNotes app (such the influencer), so I paid up and gave it a go.
I won’t bore you with the details of the app’s features. Those are well documented, and worth looking into. My issue was that this “smart app” was smarter than me. For my use, on occasion, I needed to dumb it down. While the smart features are quite impressive, and appreciated: Location, Hyperlink, Mail Address, Phone Number, Date, Flight Number, etc. …some times they got in my way.
A few weeks ago I reached out to Felix, the app’s developer, to provide constructive feedback on an app I’ve enjoyed. This was the very first time I’ve engaged in this manner. Despite the considerable timezone difference, Felix responded within hours, and was quite helpful. This exchange progressed for a week. The workaround suggested at the time was effective, but not as elegant as I’d hoped, but I greatly appreciated the opportunity to work with a “real person”, someone who cared.
Fast forward three weeks, Felix emailed me to let me know that SnipNotes has been updated to version 3.2.11, and has incorporated some individual note, and global content detections that should address my earlier issues.
Wowee wow wow!
I’ve found SnipNotes to be a solid app that may eventually replace Notes for me. Most importantly, the developer is someone that makes a difference, and makes the app worth that much more.
Yes, it’s responsive of the developer. I mentioned it the other day in a thread where someone was trying to turn off data detectors in general in macOS.
I really like SnipNotes, but I have many PDFs in Notes, and since SnipNotes can’t accommodate attachments other than images (something I did not realize prior to buying both the Mac and iOS app, and initially discussing it here) I cannot switch away from Notes yet. But if it does add that ability I probably will switch, because the Inbox metaphor, the menubar Quick Entry and multiple windows on the Mac is so much more useful than Notes.
After the Notes Roundup episode of MPU I’ve setup a folder for Manuals within the Notes app, and am slowly moving *.pdf’s into it. I appreciate the ability to annotate the saved file. So notes has become a repository, while I tend to create in Drafts on iOS and SnipNotes on MacOS. Less than ideal. Still searching for the “One ring to rule them all.”
There’s Notebooks, which is available for Mac, iOS and PC. I bought it a year ago for Mac/iOS, and put it through its paces and found it generally can handle what you throw at it.
One issue I had last fall was that I was unable to print a .docx document I’d stored in the app; when I contacted the dev he replied
docx files are somewhat special, because we use macOS Quicklook to open and display them in Notebooks. This does not support/include print, unfortunately, and it seems that we forgot to disable printing for these types of documents…
So instead of printing the document directly from within Notebooks you need to open it first (cmd-O) and print from the associated application.
Not a deal-killer, but it’s little things like that which kept me from choosing to rely on the app. Overall, it’s really quite nice though.
