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...?

MadaboutDana wrote:

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

For the above I would have suggested WorkFlowy (though it depends on what you mean by "rich text". WF can do italics and bold and that's it, I think). But then you mention syncing attachments, PDFs, and web captures, which it can't do. Your requirements seem quite complex and go against each other, as speed and footprint do depend on the type of data you're syncing (which is why WorkFlowy is so quick, as it's just pure text).

You're right. I tried Workflowy, as well as Omnioutliner (the only rich-text cross-platform outliners around). They're good, but as you remark, not good enough.

If you're going to have a couple of apps open on your desktop all the time, they have to be fast and resource-efficient. The same applies (more or less by definition) to the mobile operating system that is iOS.

So I took a closer look at my relatively new acquisition, Keep Everything.

Keep Everything saves web pages you drag and drop onto it as two things: a web archive (usually quite bulky, as those who work regularly with web archives will already know) and an easy-to-read article based on information (text and graphics) extracted from the main part of the web page. Each entry is saved in these two formats; the article is displayed in the list of entries by default, but you can switch between article and full web-page view using a convenient pair of tabs at the top of each page.

Unusually, however, Keep Everything encodes the article in Markdown. The default display is non-editable - but you can edit articles by pressing a simple 'Edit' button.

This means you can also use Keep Everything as a Markdown-based notes manager. The 'Add note' function in the menu bar allows you to add material directly from the clipboard, by downloading from a URL, or by opening a file from disk.

Or as a 'New text' note - meaning, a Markdown note.

The Markdown editor is not sophisticated (no 'hybrid display', no menu bar of convenient Markdown shortcuts). But Keep Everything does something I wish all Markdown editors did by default: it displays the read-only formatted web page by default. To edit the underlying Markdown code, you press the 'Edit' button. This is much more information-friendly.

Other Markdown editors tend to do one of two things. They either display a hybrid view (Ulysses, Metanota Pro), or they use a dual-pane view (Markdown on left, preview on right). LightPaper is the only Markdown editor that does both of these things - the editing pane displays a hybrid view, and you can toggle the Preview pane on/off as you prefer.

But Keep Everything displays the fully formatted preview by default. The app is, after all, optimised for viewing web pages. For me, that's a big plus. If I'm scanning quickly through information, I like that information to be clearly formatted, ergo easy to evaluate. Even a hybrid view is annoying.

So why not use Keep Everything as the information manager for managing ALL my day-to-day information?

I had already got into the habit of doing something some people will regard as slightly peculiar.

After saving a web page to Keep Everything, I quickly review the article view of that page and ensure that all the content has been preserved (not always the case, due to the difficulty of extracting all relevant data from highly complex web pages).

Once I'm happy all the content is in the article, I go into 'Edit' mode and copy all the Markdown code from the article.

Then I create a new text file and paste the Markdown code into it.

This creates an identical article to one associated with the original web page - but without the cumbersome web archive. Saving, on average, megabytes of data for each entry.

Then I delete the original entry with its web archive. I have all I need in the simple article.

I've written to the developer suggesting this workflow could be automated. I'm delighted to say he agrees.

It means that unlike the data I have saved in DEVONthink Pro, EagleFiler and even Notebooks, almost all the data in Keep Everything is preserved as straight Markdown text (with a few web archives for super-complex pages where the article extraction hasn't worked properly).

This means that despite the growing volume of data in Keep Everything, it's still very nippy, with a minimal system footprint.

So I reviewed the other things task management software does. Notably, remind you of deadlines etc.

Just how crucial is this function, really? You know what? It isn't. It really isn't. The thing that most frequently causes me to see red when using conventional task management software is the speed with which your entries for 'Today' start to fill up with stuff you haven't done yet, meant to do a few days ago but forgot, would like to do sometime but don't quite dare to shove into the 'Tomorrow' or 'Later' piles. That stack of guilt-inducing reminders that tell you you're not being efficient enough.

Most task management software isn't very flexible in this respect. Yes, GTD has improved things here, but most actual task management apps still expect and encourage you to specify 'due dates' for your various tasks. It's a fundamental part of the way they're structured.

Keep Everything has another trick to play here.

Not only can you put all entries into 'Categories' (= folders), you can also 'group' them.

What does this mean? It means you can select a group of items and instruct the program to group them together. This means they appear as a single item with a coloured button on one side with a number on it (representing the number of grouped items). If you prod the button, the item opens up to reveal its contents. Because Keep Everything is effectively a three-pane outliner, this means the central pane now displays the sub-items in the group (rather than all items in the relevant folder).

This is similar to the way certain outliners (Word, Ulysses, Taskpaper) use headings as navigation points in outlines.

And it makes Keep Everything perfect for task management.

You don't have to have a single large note with all your tasks on it. Or even multiple smaller notes in folder. Instead, you can create multiple notes (e.g. equivalent to GTD categories like 'Today', 'Tomorrow', 'Later', or based on any other scheme you like - I tend to use type-of-work categories like 'Projects', 'Admin', 'Home', 'Personal' etc., with one 'Right NOW' category) and then group them together.

If you drag and drop your task management notes onto each other, Keep Everything will group them in the order you dragged and dropped them, using the target note as the overall 'container'. Very simple, very elegant.

So when I look at my grouped tasks, they appear in my preferred order, in easily edited, bite-size chunks.

If I really need to remind myself of a particular deadline, I put a reminder in Apple's Reminders or Calendar. They're always running behind the scenes, and automatically sync with my various iOS devices, so they're the most logical place to store actual reminders.

Everything else is now managed in Keep... well, Everything.

Just one caveat, the one pothole in my otherwise smooth transition to a new way of working: Keep Everything supports HTML, text files and images (of all kinds), but doesn't store PDFs.

Funnily enough, I don't really mind.

Epilogue:
I apologise for this series of lengthy entries, but I thought they might be of interest to fellow CRIMPers, and so I've indulged myself. Hopefully the 'chunking' of the information will make it slightly easier to read!

Other apps worth mentioning, but which I eventually discarded after due consideration:

OneNote (most platforms)
Outline+ (Mac + iPad)
Circus Notebooks (Mac + iPad)
Notebooks (Mac + iOS)
Notability (Mac + iOS)
Quip (online + iOS)
[Carbonfin] Outliner (online + iOS)
NoteSuite (Mac + iPad)
TapForms (Mac + iOS)
Priorities (online + iOS)
ListBook (Mac + iOS)
TaskAgent (Mac + iOS)
Taskpaper + Taskmator (Mac + iOS respectively)
Wunderlist (everything in sight!)
Todo Cloud (Mac + iOS)
NotesTab (Mac + iOS)
Notefile (Mac + iOS)
Byword (Mac + iOS)
Write (Mac + iOS)
iaWrite (Mac + iOS)

and one or two others I've probably forgotten. This most recent adventure has clearly shown me - once again - that there's still plenty of opportunity out there for somebody to produce the ultimate cross-platform info management app.

For the time being, that's Keep Everything. But tomorrow... who knows?

MadaboutDana wrote:

So I reviewed the other things task management software does. Notably,
remind you of deadlines etc.

Just how crucial is this function, really? You know what? It isn't. It
really isn't. The thing that most frequently causes me to see red when
using conventional task management software is the speed with which your
entries for 'Today' start to fill up with stuff you haven't done yet,
meant to do a few days ago but forgot, would like to do sometime but
don't quite dare to shove into the 'Tomorrow' or 'Later' piles. That
stack of guilt-inducing reminders that tell you you're not being
efficient enough.

Most task management software isn't very flexible in this respect.

I agree. To put it another way, your to-do software also should help you **forget** what turns out to be not so important in the end.

The way I deal with that is that if a task has a deadline and it's important, it goes into a calendar (google cal for me), not to my to-do list.

The reason I like WorkFlowy for to-dos is because it allows me both to record to-dos (so I can get them out of my mind but have them saved somewhere) and to "forget" them by pushing them down the list or into an outline branch, where I can find them later, if needed, or forget about them until they're no longer relevant and can be deleted.

So the principle is to have an app (it doesn't have to be WF) that allows you the flexibility to create your own system, rather than being forced into someone else's idea of task management.

Absolutely. And I'd love it if some of these Markdown editors (especially Keep Everything!) included outlining features so you could move items around more conveniently (the only iOS outliner I can think of that does that is Cotton Notes, and unfortunately it doesn't have a desktop equivalent).

But the way you can break down tasks into multiple, easy-access notes in Keep Everything is an acceptable second best. The grouping feature is common to both Mac and iOS apps, and it's flexible, i.e. you can choose whether to see all the notes in a single group, or just one at a time (just like hoisting, really). Like all the best bits of design, it's deceptively simple, and effectively turns all versions of Keep Everything into genuine outliners, albeit without folding.

Oh, and the final clincher. I've just discovered (doh!) that you can open and edit Keep Everything notes and entries in multiple windows. Perfect for transferring notes and tasks hither and yon.

Never one to pass up a good CRIMP, I've downloaded Keep Everything (lite) to check it over this weekend.

I guess I have a different idea of "Everything" -- web pages, tweets, etc., are very little of my everything. Most of what I keep (in DEVONthink, mainly, but also in vanilla folders) are heavyweights like PDF, .docx, .xlsx, etc.

DEVONthink has never been a resource problem for me, but I consciously decided a couple of years ago to buy a maxed-out MacBook Air -- maximum memory - 8GB - and maximum SSD - 500 GB. It's earned its keep over and over. I always concurrently run DEVONthink with 12+ GB of databases, Mail, Safari, Parallels with Windows 8 and the Office suite, Curio, OmniFocus, and a bunch of editors. Never ever had a slowdown on this puppy.

In retrospect, it's what I should have done. But in the meantime, I take some pleasure in streamlining the way I work as much as possible. And in fact, even a 4GB MBA is not as wimpy as I've heard people suggest - especially if you do something PC users are better at than most Mac users, maybe: clean your machine as regularly as possible.

LOL - my first laptop had a black-and-white screen and 20 MB (yes, MB) of disk space. I spent half my time scraping bits off it, defragging (who does that anymore?), and putting stuff on floppies. I still have it!

MadaboutDana wrote:

if you do something PC users are better at than most Mac
users, maybe: clean your machine as regularly as possible.

I believe Cotton Notes has a Chrome app - so does work cross platform.

And, oddly, I just stumbled across this: http://www.ollapp.com/app/cotton-notes/android Not sure how old that is. I'm not actually a Cotton Notes user. But those who are (in the Mac world) rate it highly, and it appears to be a capable outliner.

Having now had some time to spend working with Keep Everything, I don't think I would use it. The markdown is nice and crisp; the style options adequate. Converting web pages to "articles" (the in-app term for ad-free markdown versions) seems to take a while. The app must be using a web service such as Markdownifie on a slow server. The app keeps its data in binary files -- an odd choice for a markdown-centric app. We can export articles to PDF, but not export or save to a plain-text markdown file. There is no browser extension or bookmarklets to get items from the browser to Keep Everything -- we need to copy/paste.

The share sheet on the toolbar implements only email sharing.

(Tip, the rest of the share sheets are available in a round-about manner -- select an atricle, click "Edit", then select all and open the contextual menu. The rest of the share options configured for that machine are available from the contextual menu.)

But, in the vein on software that does "one thing well" -- Keep Everything is well built and pleasant to use, IMO.

Not entirely true, Paul. You can copy the plain-text Markdown code out of each article in 'Edit' mode (granted that's less convenient than a proper export option). And you don't need to copy and paste web pages: you can either drag and drop the URL from your browser's address bar onto Keep Everything, or use the option to import from URL (invoked by simply copying the URL), or import portions of web pages directly from the clipboard. It's all there in the 'Add data' button (the cross-shaped icon above the notes list). The iOS version automatically pastes anything copied to the clipboard (as soon as it opens). I've never yet had to use a paste function in Keep Everything (desktop or iOS)!

Paul Korm wrote:

Having now had some time to spend working with Keep Everything, I don't
think I would use it. The markdown is nice and crisp; the style
options adequate. Converting web pages to "articles" (the in-app term
for ad-free markdown versions) seems to take a while. The app must be
using a web service such as Markdownifie on a slow server. The app
keeps its data in binary files -- an odd choice for a markdown-centric
app. We can export articles to PDF, but not export or save to a
plain-text markdown file. There is no browser extension or
bookmarklets to get items from the browser to Keep Everything -- we need
to copy/paste.

The share sheet on the toolbar implements only email sharing.

(Tip, the rest of the share sheets are available in a round-about manner
-- select an atricle, click "Edit", then select all and open the
contextual menu. The rest of the share options configured for that
machine are available from the contextual menu.)

But, in the vein on software that does "one thing well" -- Keep
Everything is well built and pleasant to use, IMO.

As for the web archive conversion: in my experience, it's about as fast as converting web pages for DEVONthink Pro or EagleFiler, certainly not much slower. And it takes place in the background, too, just like the other two.

But it's all a question of expectations, I suppose.

Finally, Paul, you mention that Keep Everything stores its data in binary files. Again, not entirely true. The main library consists of binary files - but if you use Dropbox to sync with your other devices, the data in the _SCRAP_DATA folder in Dropbox (under /Apps/Keep Everything) is held in its original format, i.e. as both .md (Markdown text) files, .html (web text) files and .webarchive files, plus any images in their original formats if you've saved them out. _SCRAP_DATA_ is a misnomer - it's actually the main data repository; all the other folders appear to be full of zero-byte placeholders; effectively filenames used as coded references. A clever way to use Dropbox, in my view.

I've enhanced QuickView with a Markdown filter, consequently it's very easy to scroll through Keep Everything data and view it in its original formats, whether as Markdown articles or as web pages.

Keep Everything continues to grow on me. The one negative I've found to date: despite the fact it supports a slightly enhanced form of Markdown (thus for example tables, plus ~~ for strikeout), it's not entirely GitHub-compatible, so it doesn't support marking, commenting, footnotes and a couple of other desirable extras. But that's not a major issue.

If I could delete my opinions I would. This forum doesn't support that. So, I'll just shutup.

Hey, no worries! You're not working with Keep Everything every day, whereas I am!

And I now keep a fairly obsessive eye on my Dropbox folder to make sure the Keep Everything database is as streamlined as possible.

As I say, I'm mildly disappointed by the lack of full GitHub/MultiMarkdown support, but I'm sure that'll appear in a future version. At least, I hope it will! I'd love full GitHub checkbox support, I must say.

But I'm ridiculously pleased by the fact that when Keep Everything is running on an iPad, it keeps the navigation pane open down the left-hand side. So many apps are opting for the 'easy writer' approach, meaning as soon as you open a note the navigation bar (list of notes, folders, whatever) disappears. I find this really annoying, especially when I'm reading through lots of notes in quick succession (as I do in Notebooks, for example).

From screenshots and descriptions, I fear Ulysses for iPad may be about to make this mistake!

The apps that DON'T do this - i.e. that do allow you to view your list of notes even while you're browsing through the note content - include Notebooks, OneNote, Outline+, Keep Everything, WriteUp and one or two others. Most of them automatically fade out the list of notes if you rotate the device into portrait mode, which seems like a sensible compromise to me.

I suppose what surprises me is how few of the other apps (the ones that don't show the list of notes while you're reading/editing an individual note) don't even offer the option. On a retina iPad, the screen is more than clear enough for a list of notes to be included. OneNote and Outline+ sensibly offer a slew of options here, including a full-screen, no-distraction option.