Source: Notes on Notes.app — 512 Pixels
I’ve had an on-again, off-again thing with Evernote for years. I like having attachments associated with my notes, but dislike almost everything about the service itself.
That said, there’s a lot in Evernote that I don’t use. I don’t have IFTTT routing any content in, and I don’t ever forward emails to the system. I occasionally use the web clipper to save webpages to Evernote, but it’s nowhere near vital to my workflow.
The nerd in me really likes having my notes saved as text documents, written in Markdown. I’ve used Brett Terpstra’s excellent nvALT for years, too. My biggest problem is that I can’t ever seem to find a Dropbox-powered notes app on iOS that I like. Additionally, going text-only means I need to store assorted attachments elsewhere.
I’ve lived with this tension for years, migrating content back and forth between the two systems several times.
(I’ve also spent a lot of time in Simplenote, which I’ve liked for years. It’s fast, lightweight and reliable, but the lack of attachments means it has the same core problem as plain text.)
When Apple showed off iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan, the built-in Notes app got a lot of attention. Gone was the old, let’s-sync-via-IMAP-and-hope-for-the-best system. In its place, a more modern backend — powered by CloudKit — to an app with a lot more features than before.
The new Notes app allows users to style their text easily, add checklists, photos and even hand-drawn sketches. But is it any good?
In a word, yes.