A little about my Evernote 2023 experiment: baty.net/2023/ever…

@jack I was just in evernote this morning, recovering some linux commands that I used to run and never migrated away. I rarely use it nowadays, but I remember one thing I really enjoyed, was to tell it to download specific notebooks on iOS, so I was sure I had it offline, nowadays, with Craft, I am never sure if stuff is offline or not, so I end up duplicating stuff just to be sure. 🙄

@jack Interesting. I went back to Obsidian after trying it early and have been blown away by how good it is now. As a fellow Emacs person, I mostly just write the notes in Emacs, and Obsidian works and syncs perfectly (iCloud).

Haven't needed any plugins yet, so no complaints!

@njr I've tried (pretty hard, I think) to click with Obidian 5 or 6 times and just can't hang on. It keeps getting better, but always feels "off" and I don't want an app I'm going to be in that much to feel wrong. I'm sure I'll try again, because on paper at least, it's the "right" answer.

@jack Yes, notes systems are like that, aren't they? Can believe I'll find some fatal flaw, but I moved over new year so must be over 2 weeks now and still super impressed, after hating early versions.

A directory hierarchy of plain text files is the sine qua non for me.

@jack @njr I tried a number of times to get into Obsidian and couldn’t do it. But this fall I tried again and haven’t looked back. I was an early adopter of Evernote but stopped using it a couple of years ago. Drafts and Ulysses are my other writing and notes apps.

@mbkriegh I keep thinking (hoping?) that will happen for me but so far no go. I never clicked with Drafts either but I've been using Ulysses on and off for a long time. Currently for writing/posting to WordPress.

@jack @mbkriegh @njr After years happily using iA Writer for writing blog posts on iPad I tried Obsidian last year and it didn't stick. Tried Taio, another markdown editor for iPad which stuck for most of 2022. Then just a few months back came across Notebooks. I wasn't really looking to switch again but Notebooks was interesting because it also allows for adding pdfs, scanning documents, sketches and even audio. My primary interest there was the possiblity of pdfs which Notebooks includes in full text content searches. Same for scans of text documents. Suddenly this was an app that might replace the Apple Notes app for those notes where I want to have an attached pdf. Works great on iPhone and iPad. I've not tried the Mac app as it's an additional purchase and I don't use my Mac much.

@Denny Makes sense. That's a broader conception on notes than mine. Traditionally, mine was just plain text, and with Obsidian I'm starting to use Markdown too, including occasional images. But, for me, notes are never PDF and PDFs are never notes.

@jack it took spending some time getting to know the capabilities and developing a way of working that took advantage. I wish it were easier to publish out of it but that has become a small issue. I use it to kepp notes on readings and links.