NotePlan 3 public beta (and subscription)

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 10, 2021 at 10:52 AM

Heh heh – I’m afraid I’ve made NotePlan (macOS/iOS) my definitive task management application, even though we use Pagico at business level.

The folding just makes an exceedingly efficient to-do app even better. What is is about NotePlan that’s so good? Someone summed it up very well on the Discord forum last night: there are no constraints. You can start writing anywhere, there’s no need to decide whether you’re creating a task, or writing a comment, or putting together a bullet list. After you’ve written stuff down, that’s when you can decide how to use it. It’s easy to add tasks (or subtasks: NotePlan does now differentiate) to your daily list from anywhere.

Folding (currently based on the simple heading/subheading model, like FoldingText, but folding of tasks/subtasks is on the roadmap) has made the app even more flexible. Now you can run very large projects from a single “note”, adding tasks under whichever heading you like so that they appear on the dates you specify (for those who don’t know: NotePlan has two separate groups of notes – general Notes, which are basically markdown text files, and Daily Notes, which are basically… well, they’re also markdown text files, but attached to a specific date, hence displayed alongside a calendar view which also shows Apple Calendar events; you can add times to your tasks in Daily Notes so they also appear in the calendar view).

The other huge advantage of NotePlan? Everything is text-based; NotePlan data files are simply standard text files with markdown formatting (the latter becoming ever more sophisticated after Eduard the developer opted for a preview-style hybrid display, like Typora’s; markdown code only appears when you move to a particular heading/sentence and start editing it). This means you can open NotePlan files from anywhere, and save them out effortlessly. Even if you’re using Apple’s CloudKit (and Eduard makes that optional – otherwise NotePlan uses the standard iCloud setup), NotePlan allows you to open the parent folders in Finder, so you can easily back them up/copy them or open the files in another editor.

It’s not the cheapest app, subscription-wise, but it replaces so many other apps that it’s well worth the outlay. What have I sacrificed on the NotePlan altar? Ulysses, Bear, MWeb, Typora, Obsidian, all my to-do apps including Things 3, Todoist and others… the list goes on. Even if you never use the Daily Notes, the general Notes function is so flexible it’s ridiculous: you’ve got folders, nested tags, nested mentions, backlinks – all the things info management apps are expected to have nowadays. And now folding!

Cheers,
Bill

satis wrote:
Folding text added to NotePlan. (Must…resist…)
> >https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKOrZ554Ag8
> >