[I started to write this in response to Craft comments in the recent Walling thread, but then decided it might need a thread of its own.]

I am getting close to retiring, so two things are occurring:

1. I won't need apps that work on Mac AND Windows; and
2. I am looking to cutback on the apps I pay for and what I pay for them.

This likely means I will stop using my favorite app, Reflect, because it costs $120 a year and is basically just a daily notes app (a great one).

Craft is an appealing and intriguing app. I have been trying to work it into my info-manager workflow for some time, but it never quite seems to click. The team behind it sure does work hard at adding features and -- more importantly -- functionality. It can replace three apps if I were to adopt it. And its subscription is half that of Reflect.

Of course, I can always just use Apple's lineup of apps that come free on the Mac and iPad. But the CRIMPER in me resists that "easy" out.

Increasingly, I'm looking for apps that work across all platforms, not just Mac and Windows (reading a lot of Cory Doctorow at the moment, and boy, the manipulations of Big Tech are just so depressing!)

So I'm experimenting on ZorinOS (a very nice Linux distro that comes as close to Mac/Windows as you could possibly expect, and is remarkably difficult to bork – unlike e.g. Linux Mint which, despite its stellar reputation, is very easy to f*ck up as a relative novice in Linux customisation).

Apps I currently use across all platforms (Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, Linux):
- TickTick
- Obsidian
- UpNote
- Simplenote
- Aerion
- Beeper (with more or less success, but it's relatively new)
- reMarkable Desktop
- DocFetcher Pro (desktop only)
- Vivaldi (with sync option activated)
- HelixNotes
- NotesHub
- Treesheets (desktop only)
- SiYuan
- SoftMaker Office
- Notesnook
- LibreOffice (desktop only)
- PDFsam Basic (desktop only)
- Super Productivity
- Typora (desktop only)
- Zettlr (desktop only)
- Tangent (desktop only)

I also experiment with a few others:
- AppFlowy
- Anytype
- RocketCake (desktop only)
- Octarine (desktop only)
- Collabora Office

Zorin includes a very nice little utility that allows your Android smartphone to "talk" directly to the desktop OS, Zorin Connect.

I use Nextcloud as my main syncing platform for all these platforms, although on Android I have to use ActiveSync instead, because the Nextcloud mobile client is truly awful.

Linux distros have an ongoing issue with Sleep/Suspend mode; sometimes it works, sometimes it takes ages for a computer to wake up. Personally, I've solved this by powering off my laptop every time I've finished working on it. So fast does ZorinOS boot (on an ancient MacBook Air) that it's actually much quicker to reboot than wake it up from Sleep. Amusing...

That's a lot of apps. Many of them are free, or run over a Nextcloud subscription (or equivalent). SoftMaker Office is a hidden gem in the office stakes – a German office suite that mimics MS Office very well and is much prettier than LibreOffice. Having said that, LibreOffice is highly compatible with MS Office, and sometimes I find it can open/edit files with which SoftMaker Office is having difficulties. My favourite rapid data transfer app is Simplenote (although I have a few others like the Clipboard/Screenshot/Upload Remote series that are also useful); Simplenote is very reliable, very quick and very painless. Zorin Connect does copy clipboards between a ZorinOS-powered PC and a smartphone, however.

I've tried to love Craft but... no. It's a bit too fragmented for my liking, although it's a beautiful app and the team behind it work like Trojans to improve it. If you want that kind of complexity, opt for Obsidian (and maybe Obsidian Sync).

For e-mail I rely on Canary on Mac, Windows and mobile, and I'm experimenting with various other clients on Linux (Canary doesn't do one). Aerion is nice and multi-platform, but Vivaldi has a built-in e-mail client that also works very well. Vivaldi is a bit of a revelation, in fact – very nice browser that does an awful lot of stuff (and is compatible with Chrome extensions, meaning I can copy web pages into e.g. UpNote, Obsidian, Quiver, MojoPad, etc.)

I've never been dependent on Google Mail – I run our own mail services off Germany-based IONOS, which is a very well-established and reliable platform for most things. Others swear by the Swiss platform Proton, which is very privacy-focused. I've also been experimenting with Murena Workspace, offered by the people who sell various smartphones with e/OS/ (Google-free Android); it's a tailored version of Nextcloud and works very well. Murena is based in Holland, their servers are in Finland.

I hope that might be of interest/use to those of you who, like me, too, are near retirement and want to move away from the Broligarchy (to quote Carole Cadwalladr).

Best wishes to all!
Bill

While I do not dispute this in one sense, in another I do. I recognize the amazing flexibility of Obsidian, but much of that relies on third-party plug-ins, which I don't entirely trust. Craft has an amazing amount of versatility out of the box. To some extent this is apples and oranges. There are things you can do with Obsidian that you can't with Craft, but I don't need those functionalities. So for me, personally, Craft would be the better choice.

Bill wrote:

I've tried to love Craft but... no. It's a bit too fragmented for my liking, although it's a beautiful app and the team behind it work like Trojans to improve it. If you want that kind of complexity, opt for Obsidian (and maybe Obsidian Sync).

I too am nearing retirement, and recently I've been looking at Remnote as a possible replacement for Tana now that Tana has gone all-in on collaboration and AI. Remnote has potential as a PKM, even though I have no need at all for the student-focused flashcards other learning methods. It also seems to have had staying power. For me it may fall into that group of apps that I'm more likely to spend time customizing than actually using, and it also falls into the $95-$150/yr range that seems to be where most programs like this land. (I have a certain kind of respect for Evernote, which went the other direction and now costs north of $200/yr according to the message I got when I last opened my free version).

I use Craft for things like trip planning and other projects where I'm collecting information from various sources, and I find it great for that. I don't find it useful for actually working with information at any kind of scale. I've gotten used to using properties/fields/attributes, etc., for finding information based on more nuanced categories, and I don't have the sense that Craft can easily do that the way Tinderbox/Tana/Remnote and others can. Craft was surprisingly slow to adopt tags, and it's still quite rough around the edges in that area (e.g., users have called it out for not implementing global management of tags yet -- to edit a tag name, you have to do it individually in every item with that tag).

Heh, yes, I've actually been looking at a brand-new Craft installation (having over-filled my own with too much stuff, much of it unsorted and rather inelegant, all collected since the earliest days of Craft), and I accept that it's made huge progress.

But the comments made by @exatty95 are also very pertinent. It's not just tagging, it's also Craft's somewhat iffy search function, which doesn't always find stuff you know is in there (although again, I'd certainly agree that it's hugely improved, as has the table of contents).

And in certain circumstances, for reasons that are not clear to me as a non-developer, Craft can suddenly slow down radically, despite numerous e-mails over the years telling me how much the developers have succeeded in speeding up the UX. I guess it's a very complex app, trying to be the ultimate Swiss Army knife for all purposes. It's definitely akin to Notion in this respect (especially the collections). A similar if slightly less ambitious project is Anytype.

But I've recoiled somewhat, back into simplicity (so a shout-out to Exsut, which is definitely following the same philosophy); if I get too involved in setting up an app to reflect the "perfect way" I want to work, I know it's not for me. That's why, I guess, I've gone back to using UpNote as my main info repository, although I still use Obsidian as a kind of catch-all store, and also for writing (I've had occasional problems with plugins over the years, but most of the relatively simple ones I use are rock-solid in operation – I removed DataView, awesome though it is, many moons ago). Similarly, I try to use apps that already do what I want neatly and unobtrusively, without wasting lots of setup/optimisation time – that's also why I've gone back to using Treesheets.

With this in mind, I've had a wonderful time recently installing a minimalist launcher on my Android smartphone which has essentially turned it into a Balance phone (i.e. only the essentials are displayed on the home screen), in my case in white on black (there are other options!) and reducing the cognitive load involved in accessing apps to a bare minimum. There are numerous apps for doing this in Google Play; the one I've chosen is called Pro Launcher.

But I'm always happy to experiment! Hence another shout-out to all CRIMPers, you brave, valiant, foolish souls!

Cheers!
Bill

exatty95 wrote:

I use Craft for things like trip planning and other projects where I'm collecting information from various sources, and I find it great for that. I don't find it useful for actually working with information at any kind of scale. I've gotten used to using properties/fields/attributes, etc., for finding information based on more nuanced categories, and I don't have the sense that Craft can easily do that the way Tinderbox/Tana/Remnote and others can. Craft was surprisingly slow to adopt tags, and it's still quite rough around the edges in that area (e.g., users have called it out for not implementing global management of tags yet -- to edit a tag name, you have to do it individually in every item with that tag).

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

1. I won't need apps that work on Mac AND Windows; and
2. I am looking to cutback on the apps I pay for and what I pay for them.

So you're just interested in remaining in the macOS/iOS ecosystem? Just want to be sure.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

While I do not dispute this in one sense, in another I do. I recognize the amazing flexibility of Obsidian, but much of that relies on third-party plug-ins, which I don't entirely trust.

I stick only to plugins vetted by Obsidian staff. Generally, I shy away from anything GitHub -- I don't care to figure out what someone self-identifying as zgorg666's intentions are, and my interest in reading code died when I was no longer paid to do that.

Six years into retirement:

* I use Craft for building sites to share travel information with family, and carry along with us when we're exploring the world
* DEVONthink is my data vault and personal research hub, which Criss has driven to new heights with v4's thoughtful AI integration
* MarginNote 4 for working with groups of PDFs and related documents
* Obsidian, but increasingly less so -- I think it's well into its plateau years, until the coding duo get bored and invent something else
* Agenda for task and calendar-related notes (age-related "why did I make this appointment?" questions)
* Apple Notes which is a superb little app that Apple keeps making better and better, for most notes, including the obligatory list: "where diid I leave this?"
* My beloved Curio which is so much fun that I make up reasons to use it

This has been my core for decades and, continued into retirement because I know how to get out of each of them what I want. I'll CRIMP around, but I see no replacements for the core. Tana was once a powerful new idea, but it's dying a sad death and will be gone by year's end, and I don't lock up data in dying apps.

Oh, and Tinderbox, which I still don't understand why I want to fiddle with it.

Interesting, and informational, comments above, especially on how others have used Craft and what they like and dislike about it. As I initially mentioned, my use case is light, and mostly a replacement for what I previously used Walling for. Yes, there are things that I would like to see added, and I would still love to better understand how the calendar integrates with other sheets I have created (something I have yet to fully grasp for some unknown reason).

I cannot say if it is right for folks or not, but I will say that they have run lifetime sales prices from time to time, and they currently have a sale on at the moment. It may be worth opening a free or base level subscription to see if they offer a better deal in the next few months.

And a big congratulations to those who are looking at retirement in the near future. I am in the process of seeing if that is financially possible later this year, or if I need to work a bit longer. Hoping for the former, but nervous about all of the potential black swans out there that could wreak havoc on the economy. Retiring in a bad market adds lots of challenges I do not want to deal with if I do not have to.

--Ken

Yes. I should have made that clear. Relatively recently I bought a MacBook Pro, and I use an iPad and iPhone.

satis wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

>1. I won't need apps that work on Mac AND Windows; and
>2. I am looking to cutback on the apps I pay for and what I pay for them.

So you're just interested in remaining in the macOS/iOS ecosystem? Just want to be sure.

Thank you for the thoughtful responses. This is why I love this forum. Knowledgable, useful comments without an ounce of snark or condescension.

Replying to Paul's comments. Curio, DevonThink and Tinderbox were among the first apps I invested in when I switched back to Mac in 2008 for my personal use. (Along with Scrivener and Circus Ponies Notebook.) Oddly, none of those apps has become a part of my workflow, though with more time for writing, I will be using Scrivener more, I think. I'd love to keep Curio and Tinderbox, but the annual expense of their subscriptions means I'll likely make them part of the purge for the purposes of keeping the costs of computing down.

I had to chuckle on this line "Oh, and Tinderbox, which I still don't understand why I want to fiddle with it."

Only because I too kept a sub for several years as something just kept pulling me back wanting to learn it, but alas it just never worked out and I decided if it is this hard to manage notes, it's not for me.

Mark

Paul Korm wrote:

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>While I do not dispute this in one sense, in another I do. I recognize the amazing flexibility of Obsidian, but much of that relies on third-party plug-ins, which I don't entirely trust.

I stick only to plugins vetted by Obsidian staff. Generally, I shy away from anything GitHub -- I don't care to figure out what someone self-identifying as zgorg666's intentions are, and my interest in reading code died when I was no longer paid to do that.

Six years into retirement:

* I use Craft for building sites to share travel information with family, and carry along with us when we're exploring the world
* DEVONthink is my data vault and personal research hub, which Criss has driven to new heights with v4's thoughtful AI integration
* MarginNote 4 for working with groups of PDFs and related documents
* Obsidian, but increasingly less so -- I think it's well into its plateau years, until the coding duo get bored and invent something else
* Agenda for task and calendar-related notes (age-related "why did I make this appointment?" questions)
* Apple Notes which is a superb little app that Apple keeps making better and better, for most notes, including the obligatory list: "where diid I leave this?"
* My beloved Curio which is so much fun that I make up reasons to use it

This has been my core for decades and, continued into retirement because I know how to get out of each of them what I want. I'll CRIMP around, but I see no replacements for the core. Tana was once a powerful new idea, but it's dying a sad death and will be gone by year's end, and I don't lock up data in dying apps.

Oh, and Tinderbox, which I still don't understand why I want to fiddle with it.

Regarding Tinderbox, I wouldn't necessarily try to convince someone who doesn't yet have a subscription (actually, it isn't exactly a subscription) to get one, but if you already have a subscription, I believe you can do a lot with it without knowing all the processes. Tinderbox is an excellent outliner. And it is an excellent diagrammer. I used to write about Tinderbox on my blog, and that was a point I tried to make. If you've already invested in it, don't just give up on it. Use the tools you can. They really aren't that hard. Of course, that was over ten years ago, and a lot of apps have come along that have those same tools and may be easier to use.

It would be useful to zero in on your budget and what kinds of apps you _like_ to use, and what specifically you might need to do that Apple products don't. For example, I know people who prefer to write and save files in text or Markdown, and might gravitate to a cross-platform app like IA Writer, Drafts, MWeb or Ulysses (or a free Mac-only app like the new, super-fast Zed, or the free/pay text processor BBEdit).

For daily notes/journaling you could use any writing app, or you might consider Day One (I'm on Day 3,299 of a daily writing streak in it), or NotePlan, which are optimized for daily notes. Day One offers features like end-to-end encryption, On This Day, map view, tags and sophisticated search, calendar view, streaks, journaling reminders, Time/date/weather/location metadata in notes and more.

But for most of my personal needs Apple's included free tools work pretty great. Right now in Apple Notes I have 600+ notes in 15 folders, all transparently synced between my Mac, iPhone and iPad. And the free infinite canvas Freeform app is a visual planning powerhouse for brainstorming and mapping out complex ideas in Boards. The free suite of Notes, Calendar, Reminders, and Freeform seamlessly connect across one's Apple hardware, and can interact with each other.

I still pay s grandfathered-in $29/yr price for Todoist as a backup in case Apple Reminders goes sideways (current users pay $60/yr) but I fully migrated to Reminders ~4 years ago (when Todoist went sideways for several weeks) and now have over 1,000 items in various lists & notes and todos and it's been great: reminders, lists and kanban all in one. And if you want, dated reminders can also appear in the Calendar app.

Stephen Zeoli wrote:

Yes. I should have made that clear. Relatively recently I bought a MacBook Pro, and I use an iPad and iPhone.

>>2. I am looking to cutback on the apps I pay for and what I pay for them.

Well said. You mention NotePlan, which – although expensive – does do almost every possible thing you could want a PKM to do. I love it, but reluctantly abandoned it due to (a) cost, (b) diversification of platforms (it only runs on Mac/iOS).

I kept a Tinderbox subscription for years, mostly because I support their efforts. It's a grand project and worth becoming fluent in - but I never did.

Mr. Bernstein, if you're out there, many kudos to you. I'll be back.

At the other end of the spectrum, I've had some nice dialog with Sascha of zettelkasten.de and ended up with renewed interest in his app, The Archive.

The Archive is an nvAlt spinoff with some nice enhancements such as javascript plugins. At first glance, it looks like a throwback to days of yore, back when computers had flashing lights and real programmers carried slide rules.

It fascinates me as a minimalist app. For instance, it doesn't do backlinks. It wouldn't be hard to produce them with a javascript plugin, but there's no real need. You don't link to documents, things that look like links are searches. A side effect of finding a document is you get all the backlinks.

UUID filename prefixes are recommended and generated at a keystroke.

I trust a large swath of my professional life to Devonthink. It's never let me down. Within its zone of operations, I don't think The Archive is likely to cause any grief, either.

It's hard to crash a subdirectory of Markdown files, and that's all a little-A archive in The Archive is. No extra files or indexes, just your text.

What would be facilitated by features in more complex apps are done by practices and methods.

It's most interesting.

One issue I will face at retirement is that I will lose the many educational discounts I get as a teacher. As a result I will need to cancel a lot of services that I currently use: Notion Pro (free for educational use), Adobe Creative Cloud (heavily discounted), etc.

Similarly, I have a lot of complexity in my online life because of my teaching needs, and I would like to simplify by reducing the number of accounts I use. For instance, I currently have both Gmail and Fastmail, but after retirement I plan to only use Fastmail.

Locally, however, I am moving towards more complexity with self-designed tools (written with Claude Code), and open-source tools (which I can modify with Claude Code). I like this approach to computing. I like the control it gives me. Instead of making feature requests, I write my own plugins or apps. It can be buggy, but in the past 6 months of using CC, the power has increased exponentially. Bugs and regressions are much less frequent now. Open Source LLMs are getting better too. I imagine in a year or two one will be able to have Fable-quality LLMs hosted on your own computer, without having to pay a subscription.

@Luhmann, interesting thoughts on the role of LLMs. A quote from Brad DeLong (historian and blogger) on local models:

“Well, the championship LLM in terms of ‘thought quality’ of those I have downloaded and now have the capability of running on the on the Maxxed-Out M5Max MacBookPro burbling under the dining room sidetable turns out to be:

- not the 74GB Llama 3.3:70b (q8) from FaceBook,
- or the 42GB Deepseek-R1:70b from High-Flyer,
- or even the 35GB Qwen 3:32 (q8) from AliBaba,

but rather the 18GB Gemma 4:31b from Google”

Oh dear. Just been playing with a positively gorgeous Obsidian plugin called BeautyTasks (yes, really) that creates something resembling a complete Todoist environment in Obsidian. It's beautifully (sorry! sorry!) done. A real incentive to take my task management back to Obsidian – no, no, please, someone restrain me!

More seriously, seems pretty robust, too, even though it's very new.

Have you tried TaskForge?

https://taskforge.md/

TaskForge looks interesting, but I chickened out when it wanted to know my Obsidian vault without telling me what it was going to do with it. I'll have to read more about it.

The name sticks in my mind. Wasn't there a old Windows app with that name? Or maybe I'm conflating it with something else. The CRIMPers dilemma: "Is this thing new, or am I just too old to remember?"

I did try TaskForge for a little while, but found it a bit ungainly (although the developer's been putting a lot of effort into it, so it may be more sophisticated now). It does have the advantage of being its own separate app, which is quite cool (so you don't have to open Obsidian to consult your tasks).

On the other hand, Obsidian isn't exactly heavyweight on any platform, and I've found you can have quite a few plugins installed on, for example, your smartphone, without causing undue delays. Obsidian's handling of vaults is much more agile than it was – you can switch more easily, which means you can keep small, optimised vaults on a given device.

I don't use plugins like DataView in any case, precisely because of the overhead – all the ones I use are small and neat (although BeautyTask has really caught my fancy!) And if you're the kind of person who likes to have tasks appear in your daily note (and yes, I am such a person), then the original Tasks plugin is immensely powerful, and still under steady development.