A new App Stack - July 2024

The first half of this year has been pretty busy with writing projects, and the meat of my procrastination has involved venturing down the usual rabbit holes of new productivity and notes apps. Now that I’m slowly coming up for air, it becomes apparent that I have pretty much broken all my existing systems. Notes are spread across a variety of apps and I have no idea where to find most of them, and my task management is hanging by a thread. That was all fine when I was in the thick of writing because where things were and when I needed to get things done was all locked into my short term memory. But now I want to take stock and, honestly, my digital workspace looks like a teenager’s bedroom.

I’ve been reading a little recently about a theory of choosing apps that is akin to hiring someone for a job - you ignore all the fancy stuff the app can do and you figure out what the job description should be for the role you need it to fill and then adopt the best app for that job. It's obvious, but surprisingly easy to get sucked into apps that don't actually do what you need them to.

So, what do I need apps to do? I’m working a lot more on my iPad at the moment (not more than on the desktop, but more than I used to) and I’m liking that. Therefore any app that I’m going to be relying on needs to work natively on the iPad too. I also need proper offline functionality. Even here in London, I can sometimes find myself sitting on a bench somewhere with no cell service and I don’t want that to hamper my ability to work.

And I want simplicity, both of function and of design. I need quiet spaces, things that just work. And I need things to be ready now - apps like Capacities and Tana are truly amazing. Or they will be, but neither can work offline or usefully function on an iPad yet and, until they do, I need to accept that I’m done with trying to make do just because I really like them.

So what does that leave? Well actually, it leaves a list of old stalwarts that are kind of boring but quite comforting in their simplicity and solidity.

Things 3 - task management apps have come on in leaps and bounds since Things 3 was released. I can now have dependencies and time blocking and on and on… But all those new apps seem to require a lot of fiddling. I spend as much time moving stuff around as I do actually getting things done. I’m aware that a lot of people like Todoist, that it uses natural language and that it can now do timeblocking. All of that is well and good and I’m sure Todoist is great. But from a design standpoint, it looks ugly to me. It looks like homework. Things looks nice and it does its job quietly and easily and if I need to timeblock, I can always use a piece of paper.

Obsidian - I have been all around the houses with notes apps this year, and I’ve found plenty that are, or will be, great (I fully expect to move to Capacities when they have cracked offline functionality and an iPad app). For now, though, I have more than 3000 notes in Obsidian. I don’t love it, but it works, it’s secure, it’s offline and using it has become second-nature. I do plan to leave, but maybe not yet…

Tana - For the moment, Tana is not on the list, but I know it will creep back because I find it too useful to simply ignore. It’s frustrating that there is basically no mobile functionality, and the temptation to spend days fiddling with supertag fields is hard to resist. But I have found that using it like a jotter/bullet journal is really useful, and the mobile Capture app is the easiest thing in the world for when you have a fleeting thought that you don’t want to forget.

Scrivener - this has recently come back into rotation for me as a screenwriting app. I’m syncing it with Aeon Timeline and it has revolutionised how I work. There’s a lot more to this system than a paragraph will allow, so I will probably write about it separately at some point soon. For the moment, suffice to say that Scrivener is firmly back in the app stack. As is Aeon Timeline, which also syncs well with…

Ulysses - within which I am writing this post. I have a love/hate relationship with Ulysses which is less to do with the app than with iCloud sync, which I have often found to be unreliable. Nonetheless, Ulysses does what it does very solidly and I’m looking to get under its hood and move a lot of my prose stuff into here.

Fantastical - Calendar apps have been on the move this year. There’s Morgen and Amie and Rise and Notion Calendar (formerly Cron), all fairly new on the scene. Amie claims to sync with Things to provide timeblocking functionality, but it is abysmal currently because it seems incapable of syncing dates. I have been a Fantastical user for years and it has always worked fine. Much as I love shiny new things, I need a calendar app that actually works, so I'm sticking with it.

Other than that, MyMind and the Arc Browser stay in the stack, and I'm going to be using Raindrop with a little more regularity, because it just works very well at storing weblinks.