With the start of a new year, I’ve once again circled back on my note taking workflow. Notes are something that I consider extremely important. From random things I need to jot down and keep track of in my personal life to technical and meeting notes for work, I’ve had need of a personal knowledge base ever since I got out of college and realized my hand-written notes weren’t going to scale with my very well over the course of my career.
Notes are an item I revisit every few years to see if there’s anything better than what I’m doing now, and this has generally stemmed from a feeling of dissatisfaction with whatever I happen to be using at the time. Swapping note taking methodologies and platforms isn’t something to be taken lightly, as any change from one to another involves not just using a different piece of software but, much more challengingly, getting all of my old notes from one platform to another. While some platforms offer decent APIs or just need files to exist as Markdown, for many others the only option for this is to copy and paste everything from one to another, meaning it’s a tedious, error-prone, and painful process.
History: The Big Players
When I first realized that jotting notes in a notebook wasn’t going to cut it for me, my first platform of choice was Evernote. At the time, I had several colleagues who used it to great acclaim, and it offered a very generous free tier. I used it extensively for several years without even looking into other platforms because I was so happy with it. All good things must come to an end, though, and this was the case with Evernote when the company decided that it really needed to make more money. They absolutely gutted the free tier to make it unusable while jacking up the prices on the paid tiers. This was my first big migration.
Given that I worked with Office 365 at the time, the natural choice was OneNote. One key to note (no pun intended) is that I’ve always considered my notes to be mine, not my employers. As such, I don’t ever take notes in something controlled by my employers, meaning that I would lose access to them should I swap jobs. Spending hours figuring out how to configure Kubernetes is my knowledge that I’m keeping my notes on. If it’s something that would also benefit my employers after the fact, then I’ll duplicate my notes on it in whatever internal knowledge base the company uses. So when I tried OneNote, I did so with my personal Microsoft account, not with my company Office 365 account. While this meant the notes would stick with me, it didn’t change the fact that OneNote is nothing short of a bugged out dumpster fire. I’ve actually tried it off and on many times over the years, and it’s honestly never really improved from my perspective. Trying to keep anything organized in it is nothing short of painful. This wouldn’t be so bad if searching worked well, but in reality the search functionality was borderline useless. The first time I tried OneNote, I stuck with it for nearly a year simply because I didn’t know what else to use. Eventually my patience hit a limit, though, and I moved on.
History: Getting Creative
Around this time, a friend and I had started podcasting. With a need to store and share large files easily without being on the same local network, I ended up buying a Dropbox subscription. Part of paid Dropbox subscriptions includes Dropbox Paper. While at the time it was mainly aimed at being a collaborative online document, it worked passably for my own notes, though getting content out of OneNote and into Dropbox Paper was a completely manual process. I ended up using it for a little over a year before I stopped using Dropbox. I no longer needed to upload massive raw audio files when my friend and I stopped our podcast, and I had started using a MacBook for my work. So most of my files I was concerned with backing up were saved to iCloud, which I paid a paltry amount to get 50 GB of storage in so that I wasn’t constantly bumping my head against the default of 5GB.
This is where it would have made sense to look into Apple Notes, but my problem was accessibility. While my work machine was a MacBook, at the time I was still using an Android phone and my personal laptop was running Linux. Even when I swapped to an iPhone not long after that, I still needed to be able to access my notes from my personal laptop, and that simply wasn’t an option with Apple Notes. That being said, we had started using Confluence at work for our internal knowledge. Confluence is owned by Atlassian, which offers a suite of tech-focused SaaS. What’s interesting about their offerings, though, is that they’re free if you have 5 or fewer users. For myself, this means that it would be fine for a team of 1, which is exactly what I would need for my personal notes.
Confluence worked well for a long time, but I eventually started to feel uneasy about it. My biggest concern was that I was in the “Evernote situation” where I was counting on the platform remaining the same going into the future. Should Atlassian decide to remove free plans, my notes would be stuck. This is when I once again started looking at alternatives, not necessarily because I was unhappy with Confluence but because I didn’t like the idea of all my personal knowledge being held hostage.
At this point I tried out Obsidian. In a vacuum, Obsidian is almost the perfect note-taking application for me. The local software that I could run on my MacBook or Linux laptop just looked at a directory of Markdown files. I could easily open those files or even create new ones outside of Obsidian itself if I had a need, which also meant that if I needed to move away from Obsidian then I could still access all of my notes as plain old Markdown. Likewise, Obsidian worked really well with regard to linking between notes, making content easily chained together. It was terrific. My problem was with syncing my notes. I was using it most heavily from my work MacBook, so I had the notes saved in a directory which would sync with iCloud. This naturally created the problem of accessing my notes easily outside of the Apple ecosystem. I could use the iCloud web app to get to my files from a Linux system, for example, but then I was just left trying to download and view raw Markdown. This worked, especially considering that I don’t use my personal laptop super frequently, but it was annoying enough for me to once again look to alternatives. Obsidian offers paid plans where they will host the notes on your behalf, allowing you to access them from anything that can install the Obsidian app, but I didn’t particularly wanted to spend $4 USD per month for this functionality.
Current
At this point, I ended up taking a step back and deciding that I didn’t want to keep fighting against my tools. I wanted something simple that would “just work” versus something that was going to keep taking a significant amount of effort from me. What I wanted was something akin to Evernote but without the uncertainty or high prices. The answer was Apple Notes.
At this time, I had been paying for Apple One to increase my iCloud storage, so the concern of running out of room was alleviated. While it’s true that my notes are more or less “stuck” in Apple Notes because there isn’t an easy way to move them somewhere else, the likelihood of my leaving the Apple ecosystem shrinks every year; at this point I couldn’t even imagine going back to Windows and Android. The only real issue that stopped me previously was that I couldn’t access my notes via non-Apple systems. Recent updates to the iCloud web app alleviated this, though, as one of the things that was added was a fairly solid web app for Notes.
I’ve been operating this way for nearly 3 years now, and thus far I’m pretty happy with the results. Apple Notes has recently added some better formatting, allowing me to do things like paste in snippets that are formatted as monospace, for example, when I need to make note of shell commands or blocks of code. While note quite as robust as other offerings (e.g. I can’t do inline code blocks) it works well enough. Along with this, I’ve also found summarizing my notes to be the only real use for Apple Intelligence after its launch. When I take a large volume of notes during meetings, for example, Apple Intelligence actually does a decent job of summarizing key points, action items, etc. When I need to access my notes from a non-Apple system like my personal laptop, the web app work more than well enough.
Future
With Apple Notes working well for me, I haven’t had the occasion to dive into the alternatives in recent history; I’ve just been happy enough with what Apple offers. It’s amusing since I’ve seen tons of discussions online, often featuring the meme above, from folks who start with Apple Notes, go down various rabbit holes with complicated applications and workflows, only to eventually get tired of the overhead and just go back to Apple Notes.
The only alternative I could possibly see myself considering would be Standard Notes. Their recent addition to the Proton ecosystem makes them very appealing, but to this day Standard Notes still isn’t included as any part of a Proton plan. The idea of needing to pay $90 USD per year for my notes when Apple Notes is working well enough simply doesn’t appeal to me. Should it eventually be included as a part of paid Proton offerings, though, I’m still willing to at least give it a shot to see if it would work better for my needs considering how extensive the feature list is.
Prior to Standard Notes, the addition of Docs in Proton Drive also had some appeal for note taking. While these felt very akin to Dropbox Paper, they weren’t really meant for knowledge from the aspect that being able to quickly search for content to surface wasn’t a part of them. I would have needed a very robust organization system, and trying to manually do that versus simply searching in Apple Notes wasn’t overly appealing. That being said, things move quickly in the world of tech, so I’ll be curious what my note taking habits look like another year removed.