From Apple Notes to Notion to Obsidian to Craft

I have been experimenting (more accurately, continuing to experiment) with various productivity apps related to markdown and hierarchical note organization. I wrote about my various experiments, starting with Notion and then moving on to Obsidian. I really liked Obsidian, but unfortunately, due to sync reasons, I had to move back to Notion. I was also able to export all of my content from Evernote back to Notion. To be honest, by exporting my content from Evernote and moving stuff from Obsidian to Notion, Notion has become my one hub for all of my content.

I think of Notion as my new Evernote, where all of my files, images, screenshots, as well as photos I take from conferences and meetings, all sit in one place. This is exactly the role that Evernote played when I was using it before. Now, this is a great tool for collecting and organizing things together, but not so much for ideation, thinking, and linking. To be fair, I do manage to link various other notes as I’m putting things in, so there’s some amount of backlinking going on that still allows me to look at the context and other related stuff, but it’s still not a great place for ideation.

In this regard, I really loved Obsidian for its simplicity and clarity in linking together. However, as I mentioned in some other blog posts, attaching files including images and PDFs is not ideal in Obsidian. I have also read on Obsidian forums that people complain that Obsidian is slow to start off if you have many PDF files and heavy documents attached to your notes. People argue that this is not a good use of Obsidian.

Perhaps I should identify and clarify my use case. What I’m mainly using all of these apps for is jotting down ideas and thoughts related to my research and work. In an academic context, this usually involves papers that I find interesting, snippets and other concepts that are of interest, a few web sources and articles related to my interest in artificial intelligence, and screenshots of slides or points made during presentations at conferences and meetings. So, documents, text items, and images. Additionally, because of the citation package in Obsidian, I was able to do a good bit of writing directly in Obsidian due to its ability to support the typesetting of math formulas.

Typesetting math formulas is also supported in Notion, but you need to use double dollar signs rather than the standard single dollar sign. However, this is not that much of a hassle. Obsidian is great for writing but not for storing anything else, while Notion is great for storing various types of information but I find the interface clunky and unwieldy for writing. Other people have also complained that writing on Notion is not a fun experience. There’s nothing wrong with putting in text, but you can’t control the font sizes and there are many distracting icons around it, making it a less enjoyable interface for writing up content.

Therefore, I have still been looking around for an ideal option. I think the trouble is that many of us are trying to find one app that can do everything. If you don’t mind having a clunky interface, Evernote was good, and in this way Notion is okay too. In fact, Notion is extremely customizable, although I do find the way it works a bit unintuitive in general. I don’t mind it, but it’s not natural for me to organize my content using Notion.

But frustrations with the interface complexity have led me to consider what my other options are, and briefly thought about switching completely to Obsidian again. The trouble, of course, is that Obsidian on mobile, especially iOS and my iPhone, is a terrible experience. It takes ages to load up, and in some cases, it just hangs without loading. I use the shortcut mentioned by one of the commentators on my blog that allows you to quickly log in items into one file in Obsidian, and I thought it was working well. However, because of iCloud issues, some of the items were getting completely overwritten during the sync process, making it unreliable. The fact that I can’t use Obsidian on my iPhone is a serious shortcoming. Somewhat weirdly, I installed Obsidian on my iPad the other day, and it seems to sync magically fast, even though it’s the exact same vault.

I didn’t quite understand what was happening, so I looked up Obsidian forums, and people were mentioning that they are facing the same issues. A lot of people are complaining that the iCloud sync on Obsidian is extremely slow, and you get stuck on the same interface from the start, not really seeing it entering the vault notes at all, making it unusable. People are also surprisingly saying that using the custom sync solution on Obsidian also doesn’t change the situation. For these reasons, I’m confined to using Obsidian either on my desktop or, when it works, on the iPad. I uninstalled and reinstalled Obsidian on my iPhone, but nothing changed.

Using the share-to-notion plugin, however, Obsidian can be made to sync back to Notion. I thought this was a great setup, and I’m convinced it’s a reasonably good model. It’s been working well for the last few months.

What I would like, however, is having an app where I can focus on my tasks and organizing shorter content using a reasonable and smooth interface, as well as being offline. But for the reasons I mentioned above, Notion is not that. Then, I came across Craft. I had installed it a few months ago, and I wasn’t completely convinced. It has a beautiful interface, but nonetheless, I didn’t feel like it spoke to me right away. However, for the last few weeks, I’ve re-installed it and have been trying out various things, and in terms of my use case, I seem to find that it is a great fit.

For one thing, the app is designed specifically for Mac OS and iOS, and you can really see this in the design. It’s extremely simple and natural to use on iOS. It has a recognizable interface for Mac, which is something I care deeply about. However, since I discovered Craft late in the game, I wasn’t entirely convinced to switch at first. Also, I noticed that it’s a bit different from Notion. I think that’s one of the reasons I was hesitant to jump on the bandwagon initially.

After using Craft for the last few weeks, I noticed that it has a number of great features that I missed from Notion and actually love about Obsidian. It’s clearly not Obsidian because it doesn’t have the host of plugins that one could use in Obsidian, but the main thing from Obsidian that I really cared about is the ability to work in a beautiful, minimalist interface. Craft excels here.

Perhaps the single most important feature that I really liked about Obsidian is having my daily notes. This was a perfect place for me to write down my thoughts, journal regularly, keep track of replies to emails that I need to write, and other things. There was a single place where I could dump all my intermediate thoughts, which I could not do in Notion. In Notion, I was using the IFTTT Quick Note app to create quick entries within Notion. This was a reasonable solution for dumping thoughts, but not great for reflection because everything was spread across multiple pages. It was a place for things to sit, but not a place for ideation and reflection, which was something I disliked about using Notion.

Now, with Craft, it has the same flexible approach for daily note-taking as in Obsidian, so it’s almost as if Obsidian and Notion joined forces to create this app. Once again, the fact that I can’t use arbitrary plugins as in Obsidian is a bit of a loss, but to be honest, I wasn’t using that many crazy plugins inside Obsidian anyway. So, the fact that I can use daily logs is really powerful within Craft.

For another example where this app really shines is sometimes I would find interesting links and I would like to store them. When I would share it with Notion, it would create a separate page entry for this, which isn’t great because I have to remember to go retrieve it. It would be almost impossible to find, even if it was bookmarked. It would just be sitting as one of many bookmarks, completely inaccessible unless I remember to go search for it.

Now, with Craft, because all of these things neatly get pushed as text entries in the daily note, I have one place where all my daily observations and findings sit. The other great thing is that I want to create notes depending on the context, so like Notion and Obsidian, I can backlink documents. I can’t really see the knowledge graph as I can do in Obsidian, but I couldn’t do this with Notion anyway. Similarly, I can’t do that in Craft as far as I know, and to be honest, I don’t care about it that much. Linking notes is more important to me, as well as being able to quickly access which notes are linked to the one I am currently writing.

With Notion, I could easily attach various documents, but I struggled to create rich and interesting notes. I tried different methods, such as writing notes on my iPad using the Apple Pencil and then sharing them as a PDF to Notion, or taking photos and sharing them in Notion. However, accessing these later proved to be difficult, as I would have to search for the specific note in Notion. Many of these notes ended up being forgotten over time, and I rarely ever looked back on them.

On the other hand, with Craft, I can add various content types to a single note, such as sketches, documents, and images, and they are all displayed beautifully like a rich document, similar to working with Pages or Word. Obsidian could achieve a similar result if it supported sketch notes and images natively, but currently managing file structures can be awkward. Craft, on the other hand, excels in creating rich documents that are easy to export due to its transparent markdown, making it superior to Notion in this aspect. Additionally, its ability to support different document types within one page surpasses Obsidian, making it a powerful tool for creating rich, hierarchical documents.

So in the end, I’ve really settled on this app as a place for ideating, writing down quick pieces of math, including photographs and screenshots of interesting papers, as well as my daily findings of web articles and so on. Now I will admit, because of the vast set of plugins that I have for Obsidian, it’s not going to be as powerful as Obsidian for writing a long-form technical article, and perhaps for this reason, I may continue to use Obsidian every now and then. But in terms of handling files to allow me to write complex documents that mix text and images and handwritten notes and equations, Craft is really the ideal solution right now.

For a while, I considered using Apple Notes because it also allows a rich document type where I can add text, images, and sketches all in one document. But something about Apple Notes is unappealing to me. On one hand, Apple makes it really easy and quick for you to create notes from anywhere, but on the other hand, exporting the notes is a pain, and there is really no transparency in terms of how you can arrange and organize notes hierarchically. The recent update to Apple Notes does allow markdown type interlinking, but it’s not as smooth as any of the other apps currently based on markdown interlinking, such as Notion, Obsidian, and Craft.

So all in all, Craft is turning out to be a very powerful app. If only they would open up to allow a small set of useful plugins for the academic workflow, this would be the only app I would be using.

Now I’m still using Notion as my dump for documents and all sorts of files, and I’m not convinced yet that I really need to move all these over to Craft. Sometimes it’s good to start afresh, and that’s the approach I’m taking with this. I’m okay with having Notion as my catch-all place. This way, if I ever end up using Obsidian for certain papers, I can send that back to Notion. If I find large files that I need to attach, again, I could keep that in Notion, and whenever I need to, I can still export stuff from Craft to Notion. So I’m not planning on throwing away Notion completely, nor do I intend to move stuff from Notion to Craft. What I’m thinking is, for the current projects I have in mind and the ones I’m actively working on, Craft will be its home.

It’s offline, so I can happily work on my phone when I’m disconnected from the internet. It works on all devices and syncs smoothly. So I think I’m sticking with this now, and having a look around, I don’t see any other app that’s a very strong competitor to this one.

I looked briefly at Capacities, which I think is also an interesting approach because it’s really like taking Notion but providing a more Obsidian type workflow, with a cleaner delineation for the kinds of objects you attach. So that is good in a way, but again, it has some of the issues that I don’t like about Notion, such as limited options for interface and font sizes, etc. As far as I know, it doesn’t offer a smooth iOS experience, at least on the iPad or the iPhone. So in a way, I’m not convinced to switch from Notion to Capacities just because I feel like I would struggle against the same issues that I had with Notion.

I really wish Obsidian could be something like Craft, but I doubt this is on their roadmap. When I saw all the issues that people are facing with iCloud Sync, and some people were also pointing out that, in fact, this is obviously not the only app using iCloud Sync. There’s a whole range of other apps, including Bear, where iCloud Sync works beautifully. I do feel that there is not enough focus by the Obsidian developers to address these issues, and to me, allowing to work on my mobile devices, such as my iPhone and iPad, is critical because that’s where most of the capturing happens. And it allows me to not simply type away, but instead think about how different things link up, and not having a clear solution for working with the mobile is a serious downside for me.

I’m going to try and see if I can replicate some of the features I use with Obsidian with Craft, but again, I don’t mind if that doesn’t happen because my use of Obsidian has reduced quite a bit, and it’s now almost exclusively for long-form documents. So I don’t mind doing that and sending it back to Notion if need be. But Craft is where I will be ideating and writing things down, and keeping my thoughts organised for now, and see how it goes.