Sunday Earlier this year - at home - I switched my phone from a Google Pixel to an Apple iPhone, my desktop computer from a PC to a Mac mini, my laptop from a Chromebook to a MacBook, and my tablet from a Fire Tablet to an iPad.
I wrote about it at the time - about the reasoning - about having something completely different from work (I work for a Microsoft partner, so between breakfast and dinner every day, I tend to live an breathe Microsoft stuff wether I like it or not).
Let’s get something straight - there is nothing inherently wrong about Windows - it’s a fine operating system. There’s also nothing wrong with Chromebooks, or Android Phones, or Amazon tablets, or the various Alexa devices. I still use them all now and again. I’m not about to become another one of the evangelical zealots that so commonly mansplain from self-built soap-boxes about what the world and it’s dog should be using, and how everything else is either evil or stupid.
It’s all good.
I just fancied a change - and after working my arse off for the last few years, was able to make that change happen.
After landing in the middle of “Apple World” after so many years away (I had a MacBook about twenty years ago, and still have an iMac in the attic), I had a bit of catching up to do - deciding which were the best apps to use for this, that or the other.
A few weeks after starting out with the stock Apple apps that all their devices come with - Mail, Calendar, Notes, Reminders, etc - I started to scroll through the various replacements that might make my life easier. This is of course a ridiculous thing to be tempted to do, but there we are.
Within a few weeks I had purchased subscriptions or licenses for Things, Bear, and Day One. I’m still not quite sure why, because I’ve stopped using all of them already, and gone back to the “out of the box” apps.
A late night conversation with a friend who also went the Apple route at home succinctly described the reasons they have never invested in alternatives either - while the out-of-the-box Apple apps have shortcomings, they integrate better than any of the third party alternatives.
Just a few quick examples…
“Things” is a wonderful to-do list app. Things looks prettier than Apple Reminders, and is perhaps more slick. An Apple note with a date on it will also appear in the Calendar app though. Things can’t do that.
“Bear” is a wonderful note taking app. Bear is prettier than Apple Notes, and uses markdown - which, coming from a software development background is huge. Here’s the deal-breaker that annoyed the hell out of me though - Bear uses tags instead of folders, rather than in addition to them. This isn’t such a bad idea, but it also means that if you want to file notes against a category that doesn’t exist yet, you need to create the category when creating the note - you can’t have empty tags. When you’re planning out an area (to implement “PARA” for example), it becomes massively counter-intuitive.
Oh - one more thing - you can’t draw inside a note in Bear. You can in Apple Notes.
Before anybody starts mansplaining at me about alternative apps, or ways of using the ones I’ve already been playing with - I’ve probably already tried them. I use Obsidian at work, and continue to dick around with Notion now and again. I’ve tried all of the similar apps too. I tried Obsidian Sync at home, and realised very quickly that it was pretty terrible (Bear is MUCH better in that regard, if you’re interested).
There’s a part of me that loves Notion - that has always loved Notion - it’s just the effort that would be involved in moving over to it that stops me from doing it. And the fact that they will eventually pivot, just like Evernote, and Substack are busy doing, to monetise abso-bloody-lutely everything.
So.
I’ve ended up just using the stock apps in the Apple ecosystem, and putting up with their shortcomings - because the benefits massively outweigh them.
The only area I’m still flip-flopping around all over the place, and will probably continue to do so is writing. At the moment I use a mixture of Scrivener (a wonderful writing app, really designed for writing bigger projects), Day One (a wonderful journalling app), and Visual Studio Code. I even write in Apple Notes from time to time.
You’re probably thinking “why the hell is he using Visual Studio Code for writing?” - and it’s a good question. The answer lies in its integration with Github - the cloud based version control system that programmers rely on, and much of the writing world has no clue about. You can configure Visual Studio Code to become pretty much anything - and it seemlessly synchronises a version controlled collection of files up to the cloud for you, from anywhere, for free. The backup of my blog posts has been a curated set of markdown text files for at least the last ten years, which plays straight into its hands.
At the moment I have all of my old blog posts - stretching back to 2003 - in Github, Day One, and Scrivener. The only thing that scares me about either Scrivener or Day One is that they are proprietary - which is why I occasionally dump out the last few weeks worth of posts as markdown, and load them into Github - as a “safety deposit box” of sorts.
While playing around with Bear a few weeks ago, I loaded everything I’ve ever written into it - to see how it might handle the “motherlode”. It worked surprisingly well (although gave it a bit of a heart attack). I just caught myself in the middle of doing it though, and thought “what am I doing - this is a note taking app - not a writing app - why am I trying to make it be something it is not”…
There’s this huge temptation among the online productivity mavens - to conjure up a “second brain” solution of some sort - one app to rule them all. For some people it seems to be Notion, for others, it appears to be Obsidian. Every year or so another shiny new solution comes along, and they all tell you that the new thing is the shit.
I’ve kind of figured out for myself that there is no “one app to rule them all” - there’s not even “one way better than another” - it’s just whatever happens to work for you, at a given time. Anything else is just pushing the same block of cheese do different corners of the fridge.
I remember reading Ryder Carroll’s book about the bullet journal method - back when I used to use one every day - and being impressed with his opening comments that “the system” he came up with isn’t a set of rules - it’s a collection of things he does, that work for him - and he encourages others to pick from them, extend them, and adapt them to suit themselves.
Wow. How have I written so much about nothing that anybody else will be remotely interested in? It’s a skill, probably.