I take a ton of notes in Notes.app (and previously Simplenote). My preferred workflow is to keep a note in Notes.app until I’m “done” with it. At the point of done, I save the note as PDF to a local folder.
This distinction between active notes and completed notes is key for how my mind works. Something about reducing mental clutter, or insert your diagnosis here. I want to keep the notes around for future reference but I want them stored on my shelf.
I’d love to instead have a dedicated app serve as my note archive. It could be web or cross-platform as long as it kept privacy at the forefront. Importantly, it would be read-only; it wouldn’t take on the concern of also providing an editing interface.
2 Comments
Why did you stop using Simplenote?
I have been using it via Notational Velocity as the simplest way of keeping notes, but my notes are now divided into three-ish categories. One set of notes are highly active, living documents, to-do lists, etc. Another set are essentially clipped, but static and rarely changing reference material I want to make easy to find. The final are sort of running logs / tallies of things.
The interface for handling each could be better, but really the advantage of having them all easily searchable in one place is the most important.
I think it was because I wanted light WYSIWYG formatting. If I recall correctly, Simplenote doesn’t formally support Markdown. You can use Markdown on your own but the editor doesn’t support it particularly usefully.
Huh! Everyone has their own system, it appears 🙂 The biggest thing for me is: any note I’m not actively working in should be hidden far away.