Note taking apps are one of my obsessions, for reasons I really can’t fully understand. They are probably second only to Todo/Task apps. For me, I just like typing long form things. Maybe someday I’ll actually be competent at it!

But on to the show. I have tried lots and lots of note apps, from the included Apple Notes to OneNote. For my personal life, I’m pretty much ensconced in the Apple ecosystem. I just find it works well for me in most areas. Some of the shortcomings people have with Apple products, such as lack of configurability, walled gardens, etc., are actually reasons it works for me. Less things for me to tweak at 2 in the morning. Below are the note apps I’ve tried recently and have generally favorable things to say.

Apple Notes

Apple Notes is included on Macs, iPads, and iPhones all by default. Pair with an iCloud account and you have the digital equivalent of a scratchpad that is available on all your devices. It has basic formatting (bold, italics), headings (larger fonts), and bulleted and numbered lists. You can also create checklists with it. One of the best features of Notes is that you can use your camera to “scan” documents and such and create PDFs from it. Quite a handy feature! But as far as organization, it’s pretty limited. You can create tags using the # symbol followed by whatever tag name you want, such as #notes. And then you can create a single level of folders. No nesting or anything. Notes works with spotlight search, so you can usually find what you want. But if you have hundreds of notes, this can be a bit limiting if you’re used to a folder structure type mentality. Overall, it’s very good for a “free” note taking app.

Bear Notes

Bear has an excellent UI. It deals with “plain text” and uses a formatting system called Markdown. It’s a very simple language where you use certain characters such as asterisks, hashes, and others to indicate how you want a block of text to look when viewed through a previewer like Marked or export it to a Word doc or PDF. It’s designed for quick formatting as you go without needing to use the mouse or other things, and it’s human readable in its “raw” form. Lots you can do with it. Markdown is used in lots of places, especially in development circles, but it’s useful for any writer who wants to spend more time on content and less time trying to figure out how to create a bulleted list.

Bear does not have a file system. It uses a tags based system to create a pseudo-hierarchy. So by creating nested tags, you can simulate a folder structure, but you need to add that tag somewhere in the document, which I find a little distracting and odd. Bear also doesn’t have some advanced markdown features like tables. They’re supposedly coming with the next major version release, but at this time this has been over a year in the making. It’s not exactly a quickly developed application. Other cool features are the linking you can do to other notes, quite easily I might add. You can use it to form your second brain or Personal Knowledge Management system (PKM).

It is a very nice note taking app that is lightweight, somewhat customizable with a few themes and fonts, and very fluid. It’s available on iOS, watchOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Downsides are lack of any real filesystem in its database, is Apple only, has limited markdown features, and has comparatively slow pace of development. It has a yearly subscription of $15/year if you want to sync over your iCloud account, and it applies to all devices connected to that iCloud account. If you’re looking for something simple and straightforward to take markdown notes, you can’t go wrong with Bear.

Ulysses

Ulysses is geared more towards long form writing. It can be used for note taking without any issues, but it has a lot of features that are typically found in apps for writing blogs, articles, maybe even a novel. It does have a folder structure, supports tags/keywords, and offers a few more export options. It also uses markdown as its formatting system. You can create links to other notes you have in your system as well, though this implementation is kind of a pain. You have to go to the note you want to link to, taking focus away from your writing, copy the callback URL, go back to the note you were editing, and enter it as a standard link. Wish it was as easy as Bear or Obsidian. Ulysses also allows publishing directly to Wordpress, micro.blog, Medium, and Ghost, and has standard “writer’s” features like word count, ability to set writing goals, and I’m sure lots of other things that I have not even found.

Overall, I like Ulysses a lot. It’s easy to organize things (folders and tags), it’s robust, has more theming options than Bear, and I can easily write blog posts in it and just push up to Wordpress without copying/pasting/re-formatting. (I’m using it to write this post.) It’s available on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS as well. Major con is price. It’s $6/month or $50/year, all devices included. But if you get value out of it for whatever reason you use it, it can be worth it. I’m currently using it to manage posts for this blog, track ideas, and store second brain type information. We’ll see if I stick with it long term. I switched to Bear last year, but the reincarnation of this blog caused me to look at Ulysses again. It just lends itself to blogging more than Bear does, and it just fits better with how I want to organize things without needing to have tags inline.

Drafts

This is technically a note taking app, and it does it well. Start the app up and you have a blank space to start typing. The power of Drafts is what you can do with that text after you write it. Drafts has an Actions directory with contributions both from the developer as well as community written actions. These actions can be something simple like converting text to all caps. Or you can have actions that take the text and shove it into other apps, such as Ulysses, Bear, Reminders, Fantastical, and lots more. The whole point of Drafts is a singular place to capture things, so you can process later when you have time to think about where that epiphany or doctor’s appointment should live. The tagline for Drafts is “Where Text Starts.” And it’s true. It’s the digital inbox to capture things and get them out of your head without needing to worry about where to put those thoughts quite yet.

I like Drafts, and I should use it more than I do. It has apps for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS. The watchOS app is particularly handy. You can open it on the watch, click on the microphone and dictate a note. It transcribes it and it’s waiting on your phone (or other device since it syncs using iCloud) for you to process later. It’s not overly expensive ($20/year, all devices included on same subscription), and I can’t think of any real cons for it. If you find yourself constantly trying to remember things, or scrambling for a pen and paper to write a fleeting thought down, Drafts may help you.

Obsidian

Obsidian is a relatively new entry into the note taking world, and it’s caused quite the excitement. Let’s start with a key differentiator. It’s free for personal use. They make their money on add-ons (currently just end-to-end encrypted sync, publish), donations, and commercial licenses. It is possible to sync across your devices using iCloud (actually not that hard to do), so paying for the sync service is not required when you have multiple devices.

Obsidian uses markdown like the others, but it does not store the entries as records in a database. It stores each note as a separate markdown (text) file on your filesystem. This is the holy grail of portability. Plain text files have not changed much or any in the past 30+ years. You don’t have to worry if the app is going to be around in the future. How many people still have a copy of Word Perfect laying around? And markdown formatted text files are just about as easily readable as if they didn’t have any markdown in them. This is the beauty of markdown - portability and readability. So even if Obsidian went completely out of business and off the radar and every installation in the world stopped working, you still have access to all that data as long as you have something that can view text files.

Obsidian also uses links between notes, but can also create back links so you see what notes reference this note. So if in note A I link to note B, when I’m looking at Note B, I can see that note A references it in the back links section.

And it has a somewhat flashy “map” that displays all your notes as nodes in a great big mind map with lines running between the linked notes. I haven’t really found much use for it, and with the limited number of notes I have so far, it’s a really boring map, but it’s kind of cool to look at.

Obsidian also has plugins, both core to the functionality as well as community plugins which can do amazing things. They can change appearances, add functions, and much more. One particular plug-in, Dataview, allows for some very interesting capabilities. Think of it as an ad-hoc report writing tool. Add some meta data to your notes, write a query as part of another note, preview that note, and you have reporting in your notes.

As much as Obsidian ticks all the boxes, I haven’t completely warmed up to it quite yet. For one thing, the UI is pretty rough. You have a lot of flexibility in making it look and work the way you want by utilizing css files, community themes, and plug-ins, but the initial out of the box experience leaves a lot to be desired. You have to take the time to tweak it to your needs. So, great for being so flexible. Not so great for being kind of an intimidating first open. But I’m working on it. I may get there yet. It has a lot of potential to become the long term storage of random things I come across or think of in the middle of the night.

Conclusion

And so that ends my treatise on the note taking apps I’ve used recently. I’m mainly using Ulysses and Drafts right now. Trying to capture things in Drafts and process the inbox every evening to create tasks, appointments (not many), and random thoughts. Longer form writing is happening in Ulysses, with some second brain type material such as quotes, interesting passages, articles, etc., but the current plan is to get some of that into Obsidian once I get a handle on it. There are lots more apps out there like Craft and Roam, but the above are the ones I’ve gravitated to over the past couple years.

And as a reward for making it to the end, here’s a dog.

Had my surgery follow up visit today. Seemed to go well. Got a little more detail on what the surgery did. In a nutshell I have a lot of torn and floating cartilage that needed cleaned up. Also quite of bit of general inflamed tissue.

Overall, surgeon seemed pleased with how my knee looks 10 days after and also thought my flexibility was good. No physical therapy at this point as I’m just supposed to “move forward” at my own pace. This includes walking, straight leg lifts, and a stationary bike, which I don’t own. But I’m thinking the with the relatively flat bike path close to the house, I figure I can do some actual bike riding in a couple/few weeks. I’ll probably swap out my pedals for generic ones that I don’t clip into. Don’t think twisting out of them will feel pretty or be very easy for a while.

And heeeeeeeeeeere’s a dog…

Damn. 80-1 long shot. Incredible. Would have been better if I had placed a bet.

Probably the largest singular app obsession with me revolves around todo/task management apps for my personal half of life. I am arguably more interested in trying, configuring, and playing around with todo apps more than I am with actually doing the items on those todo apps. I think it should be classified as a condition whenever the next DSM comes out.

My needs for todo/task management are limited to personal items on my personal devices. For work, I’m pretty much limited to what they give me. So I generally don’t need full fledged project management for tracking my personal todos as I just don’t have that many projects going on. What I focus on are important tasks that need to be started by or done on a certain date as well as the mundane day to day things that I would forget until bedtime if I wasn’t reminded throughout the day. This latter class of todos is really something I try to manage as remembering to fill the coffee pot when you’ve already gone to bed is frustrating on many levels.

I’ve tried many apps and systems over the years, some with success and many with failure. Below are a few of my longer lived implementations.

Reminders

The built in Reminders app on Apple devices has a come a long way since its skeuomorphic days. It has tagging, location based reminders, repeating todos, and all the usuals you expect from a basic todo system. It’s not bad. When using iCloud account as the backend service, it works well. Recent enhancements that Apple has done include the ability to create “Smart Folders” which are just filters. Not exactly powerful in all the possible combinations, but it’s better than nothing. Pretty straightforward and simple. One of the major advantages Reminders has is direct Siri support. It’s easier to say things like “remind me tomorrow to do this” than it is to set up a shortcut to include the name of the app you want to use for a todo. There is a hack a lot of apps use to auto-import reminders when opening the app, but they’re just that - a hack. And you have to open the app before it gets imported and therefore part of the app’s list. With Siri and Reminders, I can say “remind me to do the thing in an hour” and not worry about opening another app to import it from reminders; it’s already there.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is like the fully loaded luxury car of task management. It’s based on the GTD methodology, and adheres to it for the most part. It encourages capture via a mandatory Inbox folder, scheduling, start dates (so the tasks don’t appear before the start date), tags, projects, folders, and all sorts of stuff. It’s complete overkill for me. But I used it for quite a while because it did resonate with me on many levels. It has so many ways of organizing and classifying tasks that I could spend hours creating structures that were just insane and overly complex for what I really needed to do - which was actually get things done. But it was fun to play around with. There are very few setups, smart filters, etc., that you wouldn’t be able to accomplish with OmniFocus.

It is expensive and is Apple only. You have two ways of obtaining the “pro” version, which I recommend for the custom perspective alone. You can buy the apps where mobile and macOS are separate versions, purchased separately, or you can pay $10/month for all of them plus a web interface as part of a subscription. OmniFocus has its own sync service and is end to end encrypted for peace of mind. If you have lots of projects, or areas of focus like personal, work, and side hustle, then OmniFocus may be worth it for you for all its flexibility. For me it provided more of a distraction from the actual goal of completing my todos.

TickTick

TickTick is a pretty simple todo management app. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles at all. What it does have is a reasonably priced subscription of $3/month or $28/year, and it syncs across just about all platforms, including Android and Linux. I used it for a year when I was actually exploring Android and Linux with occasional dalliances with Windows. And through it all and no matter where I was, I had access to my todo list. For that, it is a great todo app.

But as far as differentiating features to set it apart from all others, I can’t think of any. It’s simple. It’s fast. It’s reliable. And sometimes that’s all you need in a todo app.

Todoist

Like TickTick, this is a cross platform todo management system. It has templates, quick adding of tasks, and some collaboration features. The collaboration features are what set it apart from some of the other apps. It also has Kanban-like boards, but it’s not quite a true Kanaban app like Trello.

Todoist never clicked with me, despite trying it a few times. It didn’t have start dates, and I have no one I need to collaborate with. So, the feature set and my needs didn’t have a whole lot of overlap other than “track my things” which even Reminders could handle. The subscription of $4/month or $36/year was not worth it to me.

Things

Things 3 is an excellent app. It’s well designed and takes a different approach to todo lists than the others. In Things, the todos have dates associated with them, and the todos show up on the appropriate days. But if you don’t complete the task, it will just roll over to the next day. It doesn’t show up as “overdue” (unless you set a separate deadline date) and try to shame you into completing tasks just not to get yelled at by your software. For most of my todos, this is perfect. I can put todos like Mow the lawn and set a date, but if I don’t complete the task because of rain or knee injury or whatever, it just rolls to the next day without any judgment. It’s awesome. If I do have an actual due date, then I can assign a deadline date. But otherwise, it didn’t make me sad.

Things is only available on Apple devices, but the pricing is much better than OmniFocus. No subscriptions, at least yet. It offers a sync service on their own servers. In practice, this worked almost flawlessly. I think I only had one case where I ended up with a duplicate. They don’t do end to end encryption and make no guarantees about bulletproof security, though. But they’re in Germany which has some of the better privacy laws. Still, end to end encryption would have been good, and I have reservations about products that provide ongoing services without any kind of subscription past the initial purchase. But this methodology of non-judgmental rolling forward is perfect for 90% of the items I tracked.

GoodTask

GoodTask is kind of different. It’s essentially a shell on top of Reminders. So you need to be using Reminders and have some sort of backend and syncing. But it provides some added functionality on top of the standard Reminders. It has the ability to have start dates, more customizable repeating todos, and an entry screen with commonly used “shortcuts” that you create, like due next Saturday or due in three days. It has more robust smart filters so you can create your own lists of tasks to do based on the criteria you specify in that smart filter. But it does show things as overdue, like just about every other app.

It’s free to download on iOS, but they ask for $10 after week I think. macOS is $30 up front, but there’s a 30 day trial app you can download from their website. It’s not as feature rich as OmniFocus or Things, but it works well enough for what it is - an extension to the standard Reminders functionality.

Conclusion

I had been using Things 3 for about a year, but recently I’ve been transitioning to GoodTask/Reminders. I can easily add reminders via Siri or other mechanisms, and GoodTask uses them without needing to import, etc. Just works better for quick capture. Things 3 works really well from a functional standpoint, but something about the sync not being end to end encrypted and not supported by any kind of subscription made me think I might want to look at other options. Plus my never-ending quest for new task apps just kind of compels me to switch it up way too often.

And here’s a dog.

I can’t be the only one who obsesses over todo apps or note taking systems. I spend more time trying out and configuring todo apps and note taking systems than I do actual productive things (at least in my personal life - work doesn’t give me any latitude in the tools I can use).

It’s been a couple days since I posted here, and I thought I’d write just a short entry to stay in the habit. My knee is slightly improved from the weekend. It’s still really sore, but no stabbing pain. The swelling is starting to go down a bit. Still an effort to bend it or walk, but it’s now only slightly worse than it was in March.

I’m trying to compile a list of ideas for potential posts here, and it’s a pretty sad list. So far I have

• Dogs
• Tech stuff
• Photography
• Biking
  

It’s a pretty limited set of topics right now, and most are limited due to experience, current mobility, and money. So, it’s not like the above will provide a year’s worth of posts. But anyway, it’s a start to the thinking. If you have any ideas, post in the comments.

And as customary, a dog picture as a reward for reading to the end.

So I've been playing around with themes some more today, despite thinking I was in a good status quo space. So I put this one on. Kind of a large change. I'll probably keep it for a while, making tweaks to it, and see where that gets me. It renders ok on mobile/tablet as well as full computer screen, so it seems to be a good base to use. Other thing that I'll be tweaking/changing is the whole category versus tag thing. I'm not sure how I want to organize everything. Makes it a little difficult to come up with a structure when I have no idea what it is I need to prop up. Once I get a decent set of posts and decide how I want to organize the lot, I might play around with the front page. Maybe actually have one instead of just a list of posts. But we'll see. There's something about just starting out with a list of the only content on this site. If anyone has any topics they would like me to consider, drop them in the comments.

Other things I need to do is get more familiar with Wordpress and the various plugins and such that seemed to get installed when I clicked the "one step install" for setting up the site. Not sure if I want to try and keep close to stock, or if I want to see if the plugins actually help with anything. I had a plugin that was for writing pages and posts that I originally thought was the "stock" one, but upon further inspection, I found the "standard" one. It loads a heck of a lot faster when clicking on the add post button. I also want to see about enabling some plugins to make this site more performant. This is not a dedicated server or anything; it is shared hosting. It was kind of hard to justify anything more when I have not shown a dedication to posting, and I don't expect a lot of traffic.

Other than that, not a whole lot happened today. My main accomplishment was a killer nap in the morning. I napped the heck out of it. I actually do feel a little proud about it. My knee hasn't changed much since yesterday. It's still sore. It's still swollen. It's still stiff. Guessing I won't be getting that "everything is perfect overnight" miracle. It was a long shot.

And as is tradition, here is a dog picture for making it through the post.

I napped the heck out of this morning. Great feeling of accomplishment for a day off. 10/10 Would recommend.

I had minor arthroscopic knee surgery on Friday, so I've been in a recovery mode the past couple days. It's going OK. It's still swollen quite a bit, and it hurts more than when I went in. It's expected. I'm to try and walk as I feel ok with it. Basically, I'm walking quite a bit because the house is not exactly crutch friendly. I do break them out early in the morning when the knee is really stiff and moving it is uncomfortable. I'm also to do straight leg lifts, and get on a stationary bike when I feel up to it. Only hiccup in that is I don't have a stationary bike of any kind. But otherwise I hope I'm on a road to recovery.

I've passed the time by, you guessed it, working on this site and trying to figure out an online presence of some sort. My involvement of working on this site involved trying out a lot of pre-configured free themes. I'm not going to invest in any paid themes based on what I've done in the past. I have to prove to myself that I'll actually use this for an extended period of time. In the old days, I'd spend a lot of time working on actual HTML code, diving into CSS and other things of the time. I just don't have as much time nowadays. I want things to pretty much just work.

I've also added a "microblog" to the equation. It can be accessed via the link in the sidebar header/footer, but right now, it's hardly anything. The intent is to use it similar to what Twitter is used for, but without all the ads, toxic posts, controversy, and billionaire oligarchs. Is it as useful as I found Twitter? No, but to be honest I needed to step away from that a bit. I'll still scroll through my Twitter feed occasionally, but I'm also muting and unfollowing accounts that I just find tedious. It should be better for my mental wellbeing. This blog should also be kind of therapeutic if I do it correctly.

And as a reward for actually reading all the way through this, here's a dog.

Using this as a supplement to the “full” blog, to kind of replace twitter and the like. Right now, pulling the posts from the full blog to here, but I really haven’t thought through how I want this arrangement to function. But end goal is to spend less/no time on Twitter, though I’ll try and set up cross posting for a while at least.

I've had a love/hate relationship with social networks. I ditched my Facebook account years ago. But I kept my Instagram account. Twitter is a chore to constantly block accounts, but it has dog pictures. Haven't jumped on the TikTok bandwagon (much to the disappointment of my niece). My Tumblr account never really did anything. Not only because I didn't post a lot (sound familiar?), but also because I never really looked for other accounts to follow. I never connected with it. This Wordpress account is always my "next thing that I want to work on" but we see the results of that. Two posts in how many years? (Three now!)

So what am I actually looking to accomplish with social networking? Mainly humor, dog pictures, and important news. Important being a subjective word of course. Twitter has been the closest to that if you follow the right accounts and are quick with the damn block button. But recent events (ok, event) has really made me question if I want to support that thing. The ads are getting ridiculous, and the cesspool that exists now seems like it wants to become even more cesspool-y. I understand freedom of speech and all that. But ALL social networks start out as "we're not moderating anything" and they always change (usually too slowly) as people get doxxed, are threatened with bodily harm or death, advance propaganda targeting select groups and inciting violence, etc. Yes, people have the right to speak their minds. But corporations are under no obligation to act as a microphone, and probably don't want to be listed as source for coordinating such violence and intolerance. The First Amendment only applies to governmental entities. (Something that people seem to forget, including the people in the government...)

So where do we go from here now that Twitter is in the process of being put under the thumb of an oligarch? Another rich white guy thinking he knows better than all who came before. Other options exist, but they don't have the reach that Twitter has. Blogs in general are long form (as you can tell from this rambling) and not really made for exchange of ideas, conversations, or the like. There are "micro blogs" but same issue with exchange of ideas (and audience). Instagram still exists, but it's not quite the same thing. (It's for dog pictures...) Facebook the service is dead to me. Tumblr, well, I still don't get it. There are alternative twitter-like spaces (Mastodon being one I saw mentioned a bit today on Twitter), but it doesn't have anywhere close to the reach that Twitter does. (Plus, the whole separate communities thing is kind of confusing, even if the intent is to make sure no one entity controls it.)

So, I'm probably going to be spending less time on twitter until it sorts itself out (if it ever does). I'll get my dog pictures from Instagram. I'll try and rekindle my use of RSS feeds for news and interesting blogs (carefully selecting what feeds I choose). And I may even post more on this site. (I could say "or Tumblr" but that's not really going to happen.) So, it's been an interesting few days in the world of online community.

(Maybe we'll bring back usenet...)

Well, posting to this site hasn’t quite worked out the way I had planned. With work and the current pandemic, I haven’t really been out anywhere of interest. So here’s some random things from the backyard.