It’s easy to poke fun at some of Apple’s apps for being too dumbed-down, but when it comes to notes, I think that’s exactly the right approach. Part of the issue I had with Evernote was that the more capable it became, the harder it was to navigate. The majority of controls are nestled neatly at the top of the screen, and they’re all pretty self-explanatory.

It’s why I recently switched back to Things from Omnifocus for to-do list duties.Īpple Notes consists of a pane on the left for your folders, the contents of the selected folder to the right, followed by the note itself. I love white space, limited controls and clear affordance. I needed something simpler, which is why I inadvertently found myself increasingly reaching for Apple Notes. I have nothing against Evernote – it’s a wonderful app.

And before you tell me off for not supporting third-party developers, I did pay for Evernote for a good two years – just for the device syncing. You also can’t access notes offline unless you pay that monthly fee, which is an odd piece of feature-crippling, in my book. Annotating PDFs, searching for text inside Office docs, customisable templates and a 10GB monthly upload limit doesn’t excite me. At £4.99 per month, it isn’t going to break the bank, but in the new world of low-cost software, it isn’t cheap, either. The problem with Evernote’s pricing is that the paid step-up from the free plan only includes one thing I’m interested in: syncing across unlimited devices (you can only sync two on their free tier, which isn’t enough for me).

I love paying third-party developers for their apps, but they need to give me a reason to do so (ahem, Notion). It has been developed past the point of a simple note-taking platform, in my opinion, and felt more cumbersome for my needs with every release. Unless you’re particularly organised with your notes and want the ability to categorise, tag and file them to the nth degree, Evernote is absolute overkill.

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