How do you manage your notes? Evernote, Apple Notes, Bear?
We all started by having small paper notes or Post-It® notes next to the computer to manage short todo lists, action points and to have a kind of overview what we shouldn’t forget… Some people used them even for storing passwords 🤦♂️
Apple tried to digitalise this with the “Stickies” app in 1994, which is still installed by default on new mac devices with macOS Mojave. The interface and features are still the same for last decennia. I’m still aware of some people that are using this software today… 😱
By now, we have more software solutions that we can use to manage notes, and more important with sync and collaborate features as it’s 2019 already.
I started using Apple’s Notes, which was released initially with iOS 9 and Mac OS El Capitan, around 2015 with some nice features like iCloud syncing. However, after some tests, I really couldn’t trust and rely on the iCloud system, so I migrated to other tools for note keeping.
The most famous tool is Evernote, which is working pretty well and even offers a free tier. I had my notes on Evernote for quite some time without any big issues. The notes were synced nicely between all my devices. Evernote is providing browser plugins to easily copy websites, selections of texts, articles etc to new notes. There is also support for the Apple pencil on the iPad client which can be important during meetings for quick drawings and notes.
After some years, it was time to review my notes setup and all active subscriptions I have. As I’m paying for iCloud for my photo archive, and iCloud has an improved note app, I started to wonder if Evernote was still the best in class so I did a small review.
About Evernote: some main features were still missing (e.g. Markdown support) and I had the feeling the Evernote development was on a stop or on low level. There were new features, like templates, but all not in my interest. There is a collaboration feature, you can share notes, however, when you give write access to people, Evernote will use an lock-mechanism. So when one user is writing, the other users are locked out the hard way.. and it seems the locks are not always reset properly which made the system weird, unpredictable and pretty old school 😒
When trying to contact the Evernote team, it seems you need to pass a team of ambassadors on Directly.com first (wait, what?). I had some small bugs (eg a weird copy/paste bug) that seems to be unresolvable by the team and I was not sure I could fully trust them anymore on the long run 🤷♂️ Would you trust a company that you cannot contact directly? So time to start reviewing the options…
I found some nice alternatives, like https://bear.app with nice features, import, export options, markdown support and more, however, they are pretty new on the market which can be a risk on the long run. They are using the iCloud platform for storage and are pretty cheap. I gave it a quick spin, but it didn’t fully convince me (sorry).
I considered Dropbox Paper and Google Docs, but the main focus here is collaboration and less managing private notes. There is also no pencil support, nor real mobile applications.
So… after all, I decided to give the new Apple Notes a new go as it seems, based on my other iCloud experiences, that iCloud was more evolved and trustable today. Apple added more features and collaboration tools to the Notes app. Especially with the iOS 11 release, a lot of new features were added.
Evernote allows you to export all notes to an Evernote Archive (.enex) file and Apple implemented an import feature for this archive 🥳
As of today, ~2 months after the switch, I need to say I’m pretty happy. The initial import took quite some time, as the .enex file was almost 1GB which needed to be fully resynced. It seems to have lost the folder structure during the migration, however, the syncing is working nicely and my month costs are reduced as I’m already on a paid iCloud plan with enough space left.
Apple notes is offering a collaboration tool that is just working, and not using an exclusive-write-lock system. I’m not sure how conflicts are handled, and you don’t see each other typing real-time like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper, but the text and changes are merged in automatically after some minutes. The bad part is that this is a Apple-platform only system, however you can also see the notes on iCloud.com so you can view and edit notes on a Windows or Linux system, and everyone can create a free iCloud account.
The pencil support is great. In a note, you can click the ⊕ icon and add a sketch, which will insert a drawing board. However, it’s also possible to start drawing in a note which lines up with the text and looks to be having an infinity sized drawing box. This is only possible at the end of the note and I noticed that there is however a maximum height, but you can insert a new drawing area below that.
On the downside of Apple Notes, it seems that exporting from Apple Notes is a harder problem to tackle. So let’s hope that Apple will address this so we can use and switch easily from different note editors. Apple is only offering a PDF export at the moment, however you can also sync the notes with supported Email providers which I didn’t test yet.
There is an Notes-Exporter but it only export as text files, so you will lose the attachments and format. The privacy page of Apple (due GDPR) is offering a download of all your personal data, including the iCloud Notes, but I still need to give it a go.
Markdown support is also missing, but at least there are shortcuts to give the current line a style (heading/title/text/..) and the interface is easier to give the notes some basic format, both on iOS and macOS.
One thing I’m missing, from both Evernote and Apple Notes is having the options to manage notes in subfolders. Both are allowing to grouping notes in folders, but there is no support for recursive subfolders… while this doesn’t sound like a complex problem, right? 🤔
There will be never *the* perfect tool, but so far I’m happy with my switch from Evernote to the new Apple Notes and I cross my fingers for the next announcements on WWDC 2019 for crazy new features and additions.
Or should I give the bear.app a shot?
As they have plenty of import and export options…
Update: 19 January 2019: The GDPR-request export of Apple Notes is finally done. It took almost a week and they delivered a ZIP of 850MB. Inside, folders with the same structure as my notes. All notes are converted to plain text files and a folder ‘attachments’ per note with the images and other attachments.
It’s not optimal, as the format is lost in the export (having MD support would be great…) but at least all data is their inclusive the attachments, which is not possible via Apple Notes itself as export option.
