The new Agenda 14 update

Been a while since we’ve heard from the Agenda people, but Agenda 14 looks genuinely excellent. It’s the sort of app I’d be very interested in if my notes were stored locally as plain text, because I think they cover all the formatting basics I’d like to see at this point. (They also mention in the video that they’ve been slow with updates because of, you know, everything happening over the past couple years, and I hold no grudge over that.)

Ah well. Back to Obsidian. Or Noteplan. Really can’t decide.

Just wanted to share this for those who might be interested in seeing one great app’s progress.

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The link in the first post takes you to a video explaining the new features, but if you want a readable digest instead, voila. Sorry I missed this in my original post.

And there is a Premium discount for $9.99 at StackSocial. Thanks to @Atom for finding it on the April Software Discounts thread.

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I tried agenda a long time ago, when it first launched. Am I misremembering or it’s the same dev behind the old Papers academic reference apps?

At any rate: for the same reasons you mention, plain text and need to store locally where I decide and not where they decide, I’ll watch the video and go back to Obsidian, Zettlr, Nota, Taio…

Oh it is! Alex. Mekentosj. Also, it looks like they’re still using the same Thunderbolt Display since Papers app ten years ago!

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Haha I saw that too! Those were great displays. Kinda bummed I sold mine.

It’s a nice update. I haven’t played with the new autocomplete much this week, but I’ll certainly be using the value tags and \ to quickly generate summaries. I don’t have a lot of use for related notes yet, but they might grow on me. Colored tags will just be fun, I think? :slight_smile:

No need to debate philosophy around exports being good enough backup or insufficient in this thread, but the one-file-per-note options are more robust now and the results for MD and rich text look correct to me. You can export your whole database by doing cmd+a twice on the sidebar, then File > Export.

Screen Shot 2022-04-13 at 12.23.45 PM

Generally, Agenda has been a productive app for me, mostly at work. I did a comparison with Noteplan recently and thought Agenda looked better, had the better notes-dates-events association model, and had fewer bugs around the calendar on iPad. Noteplan has one thing Agenda has so far declined to add (I’ve asked), which is a single view showing every uncompleted task in the database.

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The way that I take and make notes doesn’t really work for Agenda, but I think Agenda is a cool app and like keeping up with it.

When you export markdown, how does it render tags or @ mentions?

I know what you mean! It’s a thoughtful team I’m really happy has made this business model work. I just mention how I’m doing with it periodically since I’ve written more about my use of it over the past few years and there aren’t many full-time Agenda users here. Lots of calendar meetings and clients/initiatives, which is why it works well for me.

Here’s what the export looks like for this note. The table export is weak, IMO, but I guess the content is there.

# ◉ Test note

This is text.

- [x] Forget the milk
- [ ] Remember the milk



This is a mention of @Kevin and @Dawn 

#unprocessed #due(Apr 14, 2022) 

Name

Position

Kevin

President

Dawn

CEO






That’s honestly not bad. I wonder if the table export is an oversight. But I like it otherwise. Thanks for sharing!

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That’s outrageously good value. I’ve not used it before, but it’s a beautifully designed app.

I have been using it for one thing. Meeting notes from Work. I have a running timeline and can go back in history. I had premium. I didn’t upgrade for the past 3 years as nothing in the premium was interesting to me to upgrade. Now that they have some updates released and also the discount on StackSocial was no brainer to get a premium for another year. I will evaluate it later next year based on updates when the renewal time comes in.

The files aren’t stored locally? Or do you mean they’re local, but they aren’t plain text?

The files are not available locally. No idea if they’re rendered in plain text or not because of that, but I like local and plain text for the way I think about my notes.

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The sync preferences allows you to save to one of three locations.

I have my notes saved to iCloud and I cannot find the files in my directory anywhere, so they’re not user-accessible. Which, for most people, is probably fine, because who cares? But if it’s something that’s important to you, then Agenda doesn’t offer it.

Like @cornchip said, there’s no need to turn this thread into another debate about which is better; we’ve been doing that a lot recently in other threads. But the features in this update are very cool and I like the app in general. Glad to see it adding more features. Wish it was something I was in to!

Looks like they’re saved here
~/Library/Group Containers/WRBK2Z2EG7.group.com.momenta.agenda.macos/Release/Application/

I didn’t see a way of getting at anything like individual notes through here so the export options would be it.

I’m assuming this is where everything is written to and then synced using CloudKit (thought I don’t really understand that). So if you were to turn off iCloud sync this would be the only repository of the files.

More curious about where they were vs starting another debate that has no right answer. I was thinking about indexing with DevonThink – which I don’t think is possible but I might try anyways.

Locking in the current feature set for 9.99? That seems well worth it to play around with the app for awhile. Even if I don’t use it right away.

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If anyone is on the fence about this it looks like the deal ends in 3 days from April 13.

I’m guessing that many users prefer plain text files written in markdown. So, Agenda might be a turnoff because it’s not exactly text files only. This is what the Agenda Discourse forum post says about Agenda:

Here’s an important section about the Agenda file format:

Note: While an Agenda file has the .agenda file extension it’s nothing more than a zip file that contains a JSON file with all the information from the note and a folder containing all the attachments for the exported notes. While we don’t have formally documented this format at the moment, you can find more information in the Shortcuts section of the community about it.

As long as I can export my data out of the app, I’m comfortable with using the Agenda app.

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I use Agenda for writing down presentation notes. Slide screenshots and my notes are below.

I also use it as my daily notes to write down what I learned because working as a UX, I do learn a lot of things every day, and taking notes of those made it easy to reference.

I know Agenda is not made for those stuff but it works well for me.