What is your personal favorite note-taking app? I’ve tried several, and I always come back to Apple Notes. I love it so much I wrote a book about it. Reasons I keep coming back to Notes:
What’s your best note taking app?
I’m also a fan of Apple Notes! Having my notes accessible on all my devices is the critical feature for me. I’m always thinking and some of my best ideas come to me when I’m away from my computer, so being able to quickly jot them down on my phone wherever I am and have them sync to my computer is super helpful.
I’m on Team Evernote. I’ve tried all the other note apps, and while it’s not perfect, it still does all kinds of stuff that I need, and other apps pale in comparison.
I love it so much I got certified in it.
I love Apple Notes and use them all the time, but when it comes to handwritten notes, Notability has my heart. 
Nothing feels as smooth with my Apple Pencil, and the UI is super intuitive. I’m especially obsessed with all the gorgeous planner templates you can import—shoutout to Nozomunoto for making planning feel like a creative escape! The only thing I wish Notability had is a better calculation function like Apple Notes. Maybe someday? 
I use Apple Notes a lot, too! Though, I’m a big fan of Notability. It got me through gradschool, haha!
I spent years on Evernote and Apple Notes and while they are great tools, I’ve been using Obsidian as my daily driver for the past couple of years. Its SUPER configurable and the ability to have a daily template that I can create with a mouse click that carries over my unfinished TODOs from the day before is clutch.
I also like that its simple markdown stored on my device so that gives me piece of mind from a security standpoint (although they do offer a cloud sync capability).
As a team, we recently switched to Notion and I’m loving it! I created a bunch of personal and team templates and note-taking is a breeze!
I love Notion—less so for quick notes and more so as a writing environment. I’ve been working on a serialized adventure story in my Copious Spare Time, and Notion is great for keeping track of characters and plot points.
Something I just learned: The ChatGPT app integrates with Notion (and Apple Notes) so it can read directly from the document you’re working in. It’s great for coming up with character names, figuring out how to get characters out of tight spots, and making sure things make sense.
Anyway, I was thrilled when I learned we were adopting Notion internally! It’s interesting learning to use it in a team environment. Its advantage is that you can throw whatever you want into a page: A paragraph, a list, an image, a database, etc.
That’s great when your mind is as messy creative as mine and you’re working solo, but can get messy when working with a team. Thankfully, we have @roger around to keep us organized.
I’m a big Obsidian fan, too! I love that you can configure it to suit you rather than having to configure yourself to fit an app.
There are so many fantastic community plugins that allow for connectivity to other parts of your data life.
A few of my favorite themes: Dracula Gemini, Tokyo Night, Catppuccin
A few of my favorite plugins: Advanced Canvas, Advanced Tables, Colored Tags, Excalidraw, Iconize, Kanban, Marp Slides, Mermaid Tools, Natural Language Dates, Note Refactor, Style Settings, Tags for Markdown
I’ll add one that I’m testing. It’s called Capacities. It’s relatively new and has several pricing tiers including free. It’s more object oriented than page orientated. Currently, I’m using the Pro version which allows some more integrations. It’s from a small team in Europe but they have a good development pace.
For personal notes, Apple Notes is my go-to. So simple and accessible.
For day-to-day note taking at work, I keep a Google Doc with my running notes that I try and review at least once a week. Having my notes in one place and then revisiting them each week to ID action items or follow-up tasks has been super helpful. Simple, but effective so far!
I am also an Apple Notes fan both personally and professionally. My favorite thing is being able to share and collaborate.
If they ever go away I will be lost.
I use Evernote and have been since I got my iPhone 3G in 2008. One use is as a “collector of stuff,” but my real use is a my daily journals for business and personal. I built “journal generators” in perl and AppleScript originally, when Evernote went over to Bending Spoons, I had to find another way to generate my journals. That’s when I happened upon Agile Tortoise’s Drafts. I rebuilt my “journal generators” in JavaScript in Drafts and I have it “Mail Markdown” to Evernote.
My “journal generators” select my todo list and calendar entries for the day. The personal one is unique to personal, family events, and the business one only grabs my business todos and calendar entries. I use Cultured Code’s Things for my todos.
As I go through my day, I make updates to the calendar entries, my “ttime” snippet and “ddate” snippet are pure muscle memory for me. I tag my business events with snippets that identify the customer, and another for the kind of work (planning, management, technical, etc.). At the end of the day I export my business journal in html and Drafts grabs it and makes a summary with my cumulative hours and highlighted notes for the day that I append to the journal. Then I head to the kitchen for happy hour with my wife. Day is done.
At the end of the week, I put my daily journals for the week into another html export and generate my weekly report, including a day-by-day table of billable and overhead hours that I send to my client. And, yes, there’s another module for monthly reports. (Did I mention that I like to code as a hobby?)
I’m really looking forward to being able to have an LLM on my mac to go through my notes over the years and be able to really dig into answers that I’ve already produced. I can’t go out to the wild, wild web, as I have too much confidential information.
Anyway, that’s me and my note taking apps.
Today, none! I’m app agnostic. My notes are .md files in an Obsidian vault. In addition to Obsidian, I access them using iA Writer, Textastic, and Working Copy.
I have numerous TextExpander JavaScript snippets that use regular expressions to manipulate (pre-process) the data before posting it. So, for example, I have a snippet titled ,create.yaml.options that allows me to add various options to the top of a Markdown document. Once the YAML is at the top of the document, I copy the text and trigger another snippet, ,run.yaml that transforms the text based on the YAML options at the top. Markdown + TextExpander = writing superpowers! For simple examples: One YAML option can strip HTML comments in a Markdown document. Another can strip H1 headings. I even strip Leanpub-specific Markua syntax to allow me to repurpose information.
I also use Apple Notes on a daily basis for shared notes or for quick things I need to process. I love Apple Notes, but any app with a proprietary database with limited exporting options worries me.
I also love and use Notability.
Nebo is wonderful for transforming handwritten notes to typed notes.
Best,
Hani
