Angry Robot

Notes on Notes Apps

I use notes a lot and for the past eight years I have been using Evernote. For the last oh I dunno, four? of them, I have been putting up with Evernote. They went all business-focused, and suddenly were pimping “work chat” in all the apps which is essentially the opposite feature from what I want, they let most of the apps get bloated, confusing and slow, and now it sounds like they are raising the prices. Anyway. I have options! And I shall explore them, by kicking the wheels on a few competing apps while blogging about it here. Stay tuned. OMG what a complete THRILL FEST!!!!

Let’s lay out the criteria here, maybe? I use Evernote for:

I need something that works on iOS, macOS and either the web or windows.

The one thing I’m a little hung up on is clipping web pages. I don’t want just a link, I want the page archived in some form. Evernote has a few options for this – link, full page, quote or “article” (it does sort of an Instapaper-esque parsing of the content and strips out the design and crap). I’m not confident that any of the competitors will be able to do this. So I may have to explore new ways of doing it?

Things I don’t need: work chat. I don’t use any to-do list stuff, I use OmniFocus for that. I thought the OCR stuff would be handy but in practice I rarely use it.

Apps I think I will look at: OneNote, Apple Notes, and DS Note/NoteStation, the system offered by my Synology NAS. Am I missing anything?