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FSNotes 5 (Mac)
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 27, 2021 at 04:10 PM
The more I use Noteship, the more impressed I am by the ease with which you can manage large amounts of data.
There are folders and subfolders. Top-level folders can be displayed as “sections”. Folders at any level can be twinned with a matching note, so the note appears when you click on the folder.
Folders and notes are displayed in a folding outline in the left-hand navbar.
There are tags (although not nested tags – yet).
You can select groups of notes by a number of criteria:
- in a section or folder (by clicking on the folder; notes are shown in a list view in the main editor field);
- by running a search (the results are shown in a list view ditto);
- by clicking on/using a tag (the results are shown in a list view ditto);
You can then easily run summaries using a couple of other views:
- spreadsheet view (based on fields you can spontaneously create in notes simply by typing a fieldname followed by colon + tab; this gives you enormous freedom to include/exclude fields from specific notes as/when you feel like it. No formal structure is required, although notes obviously have to share some fields in order to appear in a spreadsheet view)
- one-page summary view (which uses common headers across multiple notes; again, no formal structure is required, although notes must obviously share certain headers)
If you choose the one-page summary view, you are first offered a list of shared headers. The impressive aspect of this is that headers in notes can be hierarchised (as in H1, H2, H3); so you can have higher-order headers (which show more of the note, including subheaders), or you can decide to zoom in on shared lower-order headers.
Thus for example, I have put an H2 header “Task” at the top of each task note (I have several separate task notes, for Work, Home, Family, Hobbies etc.). Under those I have H3 headers for “do right now”, “do later” “do sometime”, and under those I have H4 headers for e.g. projects, my children, admin, meetings etc. This gives me a list of headers to view the contents of; if I select the top-level header, “Task”, I see the full contents of ALL my task notes. But if I select “do it right now”, I only see the contents of that particular section of each of my task notes, all pulled together (thus all tasks to be done right now in my Work, Home, Hobbies notes in a single list).
You can easily link notes by typing @ and then the first few characters of a note’s name – a list of notes automatically appears for selection. So I keep detailed notes of e.g. projects etc. in a separate folder, then link them back to the main Work task note so I can e.g. refer to the details of each project from a simple list under the “do it now” header.
Backlinks are automatically included in notes referred to by other notes.
Finally, the number of to-dos and/or dates in each note is shown in the left-hand outline; if you hide the notes in a folder, it will automatically display the total number of to-dos/dates in all the notes it contains.
None of these things are particularly unique in themselves (although the one-page summary of shared headers is awesome, effectively allowing you to imitate the Ulysses effect of multiple notes grouped together). But the combination, and the ease with which summary views can be generated, makes it an extremely powerful knowledge-management app.
The developer, Rico Gundermann, is very amiable and responsive, too. I have added rather a lot of things to his roadmap already!
The app should be released on the Mac App Store in around 10 days’ time (he’s already got Apple approval, he’s just got some marketing work to do).
Once it’s out, I’ll do a proper review with screenshots and post it somewhere. I’m embarrassed to say that with a true CRIMPer’s infidelity, I’m hardly using NotePlan any more, because Noteship gives me a superior overview of my activities, project management, tasks etc. Even though it doesn’t have a calendar! It’s vastly superior to Things 3, too, and more flexible than Todoist.
Cheers!
Bill
MadaboutDana wrote:
Have to agree with this. Although my latest discovery, Noteship
>(mentioned elsewhere on the forum) is currently revolutionising my life.
>And you can easily import PDFs and other files, too.
>
>satis wrote:
>Links to the Mac App Store and iOS apps at the developer’s main page:
>>
>>https://fsnot.es/
>>
>>I’ve had the app for years. Really solid, though I’ve decided I won’t
>>switch completely from Apple Notes to anything that doesn’t accommodate
>>PDF import (otherwise I’d be using this, Upnote or Snipnotes).
Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 27, 2021 at 04:11 PM
Ah, sorry! I meant to post this in the Noteship thread. Idiot. I’ll copy it over there.