Fundamental shifts of position

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2015 at 03:18 PM

Sometimes something comes along that causes you to fundamentally rethink the way you do things.

I’ve had one of those moments.

Just to provide some context: I’m working (almost) exclusively on Mac and iOS.

I’ve spent a fortune on task management apps. My most recent was (still is, actually, but won’t be for much longer) ‘Think’, which is one of the friendlier heavyweights. I’ve tried its two main competitors (2Do and OmniFocus), as well as a plethora of lightweight but friendly apps (my favourite being ListBook). But they all suffer from one major problem. Despite all the cleverness and cunning, they constrain you.

In a recent enraged flurry, I found myself surfing the web (again!) looking for something that would accommodate the way I work best. Above all, that means rich-text and cross-platform support (by cross-platform, I mean MacOS and iOS, the latter both iPhone and iPad). Oh, and minimal memory footprint - I work on a MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM, and no longer have any patience with the monoliths that snatch all system memory for themselves (with the sole exception of DEVONthink Pro, and then only in specific contexts).

As a matter of fact, it’s surprisingly difficult to find a truly cross-platform notebook capable of holding multiple notes in rich-text format. The only candidate, it turns out, is Alfons Schmid’s Notebooks, which is also capable of acting as a task manager. And admirable as it is, I already use Notebooks as a useful repository for heavyweight information - it’s become slightly too slow to use as a task manager plus information dump. Also, its Dropbox synchronisation, while very solid and stable, is slightly cumbersome and time-consuming (not least because of the millions of words in my Notebooks repository).

I played with various different Markdown editors, in the hope that one of them would do the trick. Nope, really not. Until the iOS version of Ulysses comes out, there’s too much discrepancy between the notebooks you use on the MacOS desktop and those available for iOS (Byword, Write etc. etc. etc.). Also, many cross-platform solutions don’t actually work very well!

Simplenote was too… simple. Other alternatives like Smart Notes, Notesmartly, Notefile etc. etc. either don’t work very well or are too simplistic.

What to do, what to do? Go back to OmniFocus and attempt to bend it to my will? It’s powerful, it does support rich text, it even supports attachments.

Then something else occurred to me. Alongside my task management software, I usually have at least one other application open on my desktop all the time. I use it to save general stuff I encounter on the web, in my RSS feeds and so on. I started by using DEVONthink, but it’s a heavyweight - having it running all the time was a real drain on resources. So I moved over to EagleFiler. This was much better, and saved web pages in the same formats as DEVONthink, meaning I could transfer info from EagleFiler to DEVONthink at regular intervals. In my favourite format (single-page PDFs), too! More recently, however, I’ve moved to Keep Everything, a relatively recent arrival that has an unusual feature: it saves web pages both as web archives, but also as Markdown-based articles.

Hm. My tiny brain started to churn. Was the answer there in front of me all the time…?