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Tired of note-taking apps

akkshaya.blog

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Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#151
post #148
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes are not end to end encrypted. Thanks to programs like PRISM, US military intelligence has realtime access to the plaintext contents of much of the information you store in iCloud (including notes and photos), without a court order. That, for me, makes it a nonstarter.

You must have some very interesting notes. I think for most of us, the US government wouldn't be particularly interested in our musings, but what do you suggest?

My notes do not have to be interesting for me to desire, or deserve, personal privacy.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#152
post #128

Funnily enough, I don’t think there is a really good one. There’s lots that almost do it but not quite. - Evernote: no note linking - Bear: lovely but no web or android version - OneNote: appalling in the way only MS can be - SimpleNotes: too simple - Zoho: too ...urgh - Keep: too Googley - Apple notes: too Appley - Standard Notes: too buggy I’m clearly a fussy sod. But really, just a nice, oss, local files, ability…

> Evernote: no note linking

What about this:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313588-How-to...

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#153
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes are not end to end encrypted. Thanks to programs like PRISM, US military intelligence has realtime access to the plaintext contents of much of the information you store in iCloud (including notes and photos), without a court order. That, for me, makes it a nonstarter.

Are you saying that the connection to Apple servers that hold the backups are not encrypted? That can't be... I'm almost certain they use TLS.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#155
post #129

I've tried a lot of note taking apps over the last 8 years. Over the past few months I've become less fussed about the tools and more focused on the process: I now have a file for each week (I call it a journal or weekly notes), with a heading for each day of the week, and a sub-heading for each meeting/conversation/thing I'm thinking about. At the each week, as part of my weekly review (GTD), I review the weekly not…

> I've become less fussed about the tools and more focused on the process

This has been my conclusion after years of trying different tools or even trying to make my own. Once I started focusing on the process I realized that not only I don't need a lot of features from a tool, I'm actually better off without any complex features.

I just use markdown, vim, and git. This specific choice of tools for me is only guided by one thing: I don't want to waste any brain cycles on figuring out / deciding how my note taking tools should behave. For someone else this could've been a Word doc and a folder structure. When you do that, then taking notes becomes as trivial as writing with pen and paper, except for the ability to edit and grep which is really all you need.

Bonus: it's ridicuously easy to work with markdown (and friends) with pandoc. I routinely convert all my markdown notes to html and use < 100 loc of ad-hoc JS to give it a decent browsing UI.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#156

I think this post almost touches on an interesting point - note taking apps & software are also competing against pen and paper, which are many ways stronger. As a product for example, Moleskine (arguably the brand leader) most recently reports nearly EUR 175M in sales - nearly double that of Evernote, and you have many good alternatives in any stationer for just a few dollars.

> software are also competing against pen and paper, which are many ways stronger.

for scratchy notes that you don't care about sure, but if you want to search, copy/paste, erase etc. physical notebooks are the worst.

I was an advocate for moleskine books at one time, but got sick of trying to remember where I wrote something

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#157
post #44

I believe I shared this once before. After twenty years of trying every possible note taking app from Word 95 to Notion, this is now the entirety of my note taking app: #!/bin/bash read text _date=$(date +'%Y-%m-%d') echo -e "\n$_date: $text" >> ~/Dropbox/notes/stream.txt

So you only take notes while on your actual computer. You never take notes besides when you are on your computer.

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#158
post #148
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple Notes are not end to end encrypted. Thanks to programs like PRISM, US military intelligence has realtime access to the plaintext contents of much of the information you store in iCloud (including notes and photos), without a court order. That, for me, makes it a nonstarter.

You must have some very interesting notes. I think for most of us, the US government wouldn't be particularly interested in our musings, but what do you suggest?

It's amazing that people can witness POTUS 44→45 and still make "well I have nothing to hide" arguments :/

Re: Tired of note-taking apps

#160
I think the note taking market is due for a takeover by one of the epaper writers, like the remarkable, the Sony epaper or the onyx boox. I feel very similar to the author, at the same time I've been using my Sony epaper for reading papers and taking meeting notes which is much more convenient than using a computer. If one of these companies would come up with a good note taking app, preferably with some way of making easy cross-reference and maybe ocr for search I'd move all my notes over to handwriting again.
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