A ramble about various note-taking applications

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 13, 2023 at 08:26 AM

Totally agree about Curio – extraordinary app (although the absolutely free Growly Notes is an entertaining alternative, albeit nowhere near as powerful).

I have tried TheArchive, but abandoned it after some experimentation. It’s a perfectly good app, but is being very slow to actualise its roadmap, and the current functionality can be duplicated in any number of more powerful note taking apps (including e.g. Simplenote, which hasn’t yet been mentioned).

An app I’ve been looking forward to for a couple of years is nvUltra, ostensibly an alternative turbocharged nvAlt currently under development by Brett Terpstra. But there’s been little sign of movement in recent months, and I’ve started to think it isn’t going anywhere.

I too am impressed by UpNote – the developer is extremely responsive, and I still use it quite a lot. But increasingly, I use Bear, version 2.0 of which is due out imminently, because it has such a good web capture extension (UpNote’s is pretty good, too, and works across multiple browsers), and is such a pleasure to use. The new version is clearly intended to compete with Obsidian, Roam etc., and I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Other cross-platform apps worth mentioning include Craft, which is going from strength to strength (and produces astonishingly good-looking e-mails, albeit only if you use Apple Mail), and of course Notebooks, which runs on Windows as well as all the Apple OSes. Notebooks has seen some elegant improvements lately, and is still one of my favourites for writing.

Finally, I have given way to temptation and acquired a reMarkable 2 tablet, which is truly impressive. Not least because the desktop/mobile app does allow you to use it as part of a seamless workflow. The number of third-party enhancements out there is pretty cool, as well, allowing you to load your own templates (although I’ve found you can easily use a PDF file as a template without doing any complicated SSH tunnelling or using expensive third-party apps). There is indeed something very satisfying about keeping track of daily tasks simply by writing them down – the nice thing about the reMarkable is that you can copy and paste unfinished tasks (or anything else, for that matter) to subsequent daily pages. The graphic capabilities are understated but very powerful. Yes, I should probably have opted for a Kindle Scribe instead, but I got a referrer’s discount (€40!) and in any case don’t wish to put my entire writing/reading life in the hands of Amazon. I didn’t get a reMarkable stylus, incidentally – I opted for the Staedtler Noris Jumbo pencil-alike, which works very well and is about a third of the price.

Amontillado wrote:
>I remain a fan of Curio, too. It takes very low effort to produce notes
>and thoughts in a polished format. Whatever it costs in a few extra
>mouse clicks it rewards with a pleasant arrangement of thoughts.
> >Has anyone tried TheArchive?
>https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/#the-archive