Phil Bowell

It snowed. In April. This time last week it was 20 degrees and I was wearing shorts…

I keep getting lost reading Andy Matuschak’s notes particularly around his evergreen notes concept. Might need to dedicate a bit of time to understanding exactly how it works over the next week or so.

He is risen!

I’ve been continuing to seek out a notes app that works for me as well as I would like it too. A couple of weeks ago I posted about what I’m looking for and since then I’ve been giving a couple of the contenders a try.

When I wrote that post I had been using Craft for around a week or so. It’s a very good app, I like that it is native on all my devices, has good shortcuts support and is a pleasure to write in. It lacked a couple of the features on my list out of the box, but a quick shortcut was able to fix the lack of a daily note and I was happily on my way giving it a run through it’s paces.

Having been forced into a week off work thanks to some strong side effects from my Covid vaccine, last weekend I started to play with Obsidian to see how it worked. Initially put off by it I found a theme that makes it look and feel a lot more like a native macOS application. So last week I started giving it a run through it’s paces. It’s lacking a first party iOS and iPadOS app at the moment, but one is in beta and seems to be developing quickly and since there’s nowhere to go at the moment it’s not the end of the world.

I intend to give Obsidian a similar amount of time to Craft and then I’ll try to make a decision. There are a few things about Craft which started to really annoy me before I decided to give Obsidian a try, and I’m sure there will be some things about Obsidian that annoy me as well.

So far Craft feels better placed for meeting notes and capturing tasks along the way. It’s ability to easily send something to Things is great. In contrast Obsidian seems to handle referencing and embedding blocks more efficiently. Craft can do this but I ended up having some real difficulties finding blocks I wanted to reference and once I had figured out the syntax that Obsidian uses it made a lot more sense. Both apps have their strengths, I have a feeling it will be about refining how I take notes and which one will handle that.

Realised I hadn’t bought any Easter eggs so went out to buy some. Nope. Everywhere is sold out, never seen that before.

My library has moved over to using Libby for lending of ebooks etc. It offers a download in ePub for use on eReaders like the Kobo, but not the Kindle. I’ve never considered looking into any other eReaders, might be time to explore. 📚

Considering going back to using Instapaper for my read later service instead of Reeders own version. The trouble is I’m trying to reduce the number of subscriptions I have, but the highlighting in Instapaper is really useful.

Trying out scribble on the iPad version of Things today during meetings. Seems like a good way of capturing tasks with the added bonus that it doesn’t look like I’m messaging on Teams!

Decided to try Obsidian again this week after reading about it over the weekend. Found a way to make it feel more like a Mac app which is helping and I’m starting to get my head around the differences.

Installed Ghost locally to have a play and see what the theme system is like. I’ve been thinking of moving from Wordpress for a while so this will be an interesting experiment.