
I have a master list of all my notes front and center, and I can browse it up and down.Notes are OCR’ed, and very well, so your handwritten notes surprise you in search results.I can mix formatted text and images and whatever else.search is fast and powerful, the search grammar is even better than I thought.moving notes around is fast, easy (lots of ways to do it) and low-cost,.syncing is fast (so far) and happens without me noticing it,.with cmd-J). Note organization feels very fluid and light. Note-taking is fast. Note-switching is fast (esp.(My experiment happened just after the launch of the iOS v8 app, so I don’t really know how things were before that. I moved my Onenote archives to Evernote, slowly at first as I was trying to avoid going over the upload quota, then in bigger batches as I realized how great the thing was and it dawned on me I would end up getting a paid account. I had always put Evernote in the same “Everything buckets” group*, but I had always found the app weird and alien.Īfter using it for a few days it quickly transpired that Evernote is just fucking great. Apparently I created an Evernote account in December 2008 (6 months after it came out of private beta), but I never really used it.

I ended up going all the way back to one of the first apps I’ve ever tried, i.e. But most of these apps did not provide sync or iOS apps and were not really fun. Testing those apps proved the approach was what I needed. I had been a fervent adept of such ‘Everything buckets’ apps in the past, but only as containers of PDF, never for text I would write *myself*, because (remember) notes should be ASCII only… I was now coming back to them with fresh eyes from a revised position. But I needed to see formatted text so I could think through it, not markdown syntax. Once I got over the shock (Word files? What have I become !?), I then found myself going back to apps I had been using years ago and since then discarded: Macjournal, Day One, DevonThink, Yojimbo, Together, etc. Formatted text+images+other) with a note app interface (master list view with, maybe, tags). Changing positionĪ few months ago, while thinking about this I realized what I could actually work with would be an app that let me edit word files (i.e. I have tried lots of fonts to fix this.Īnyway, I have issues with Onenote, apparently, but I still used it because I just needed something to store text mixed with images and other stuff (PPT or docs).
EAGLEFILER ONEDRIVE FREE
Free form is a great concept, but does not translate well to small phone screens.Everything feels very heavy and immutable. There’s very little context to notes: no easy way to find creation/update dates for notes, or sort them by dates. For this reason every time I create a note I feel like I need to review and revise the whole notebook organization – meaning I immerse myself in lots of information that might not be relevant to what I’m trying to do at that point. Newest notes go down, which I find confusing. I’ve never liked Onenote’s note structure and organisation.Sometimes notebooks auto-close behind my back, and I have to hunt for them in Onedrive (which is confusing by itself). Because of the lag, notebook switching is by itself a whole operation with several steps that I need to think through. Because of this, there is no ‘master list’ of notes. Onenote’s Notebooks have to be opened and closed, like files.Slow sync made things even worse, especially given that… At some point I had to re-authenticate every time I opened the app. Forget starting a note on the iPhone and picking it up on the Mac. Sync is so slow that it discourages device-switching on the fly.

Moving around on the canvas. Switching notes. Every interaction has a huge transaction cost. The free-form aspect promised by Onenote was so conceptually seducing that I agreed to put up with its worse aspects: But I could also do it in Google sheets, insert a screenshot in a word file, and use the two hours I’ve just saved to do something else.
