Cory Bohon

These are photos that I took while on vacation over the past week with my Canon R6 camera along the low country coastal region of South Carolina.

Shortcuts is an amazing tool that I’ve been using to create custom automations for years on iOS. I’m so happy that it’s finally made its way to the Mac in macOS Monterey, where I’ve been putting it to good since its inception.

I have roughly 90 Shortcuts in my library, but one that I use frequently throughout the day is one that I built when I migrated back to Apple Notes from Craft. This shortcut tries to replicate the functionality I missed from the migration: Being able to stand up a note from a calendar event.

Download the Shortcut here

This Shortcut I created searches through your calendar events to find events occurring “today,” that are not all day events (you can change this if you find yourself needing to create notes around all day events), then it presents a list of these events, and lets you choose one to create a note for it.

The Title, Start Date, End Date, and Attendees list are all retrieved from the calendar item, then a Note is created using those fields, and finally the Note is shown inside of Apple Notes and you’re off to the races and ready to begin typing.

To configure this shortcut, be sure to select a new location to store the new note inside of Apple Notes (currently I have a “Meeting Notes” folder where I store all of these).

Header Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash.

Last year I promised that I would update everyone on how my Craft Notes deep dive went. Well, it’s been nearly a year, and I think we’re overdue on an update.

Craft Notes has a lot of great features, and I really appreciate the straight-forward approach the company takes to announcing new features (nearly every week) to users, and generally keeping everyone in the know with where the product stands. Not many company’s take this stance, and it’s a breath of fresh air when users who like and back your product are kept up to date.

Last year I migrated everything over from Apple Notes to Craft Notes. I really enjoyed the ability to link notes to other notes, and the ability to design very nice notes almost like designing a web page to house your thoughts. The general design and feature set was great, and I was able to successfully transfer my nearly 1,000 Apple Notes over to the Craft app.

I never could fully wrap my head around the block editor, and more often than not the experience ended up being more frustrated than fun. If I had an option to disable the block-based editing, I would have immediately. I understand the power that could come with block-based editing, but it just wasn’t for me.

The disadvantaged of block-based editing really came full circle when copying and exporting — often times I’d find that pasting copied blocks of text would paste in reverse order, be missing formatting, or have other major issues. All of these things added up to just additional frustration and often times kept me from even taking notes.

To give Craft credit; however, they continue releasing regular updates, have fantastic support, and their apps are great on all platforms. All of my issues added up, coupled with limited export options, left me no choice but to choose another note taking app, unfortunately.

I do still like Craft notes, however, especially the recent addition of the ability to create notes based on calendar events, and I hope that the exporting and editor functionality can be improved in the future and I can revisit the app.

I alluded that I’m no longer using Craft notes, so what did I end up going back to? Well, I finished the migration last month back to Apple Notes. Honestly, Apple Notes has most of what I need in a notes app: It’s got an inline editor, it’s got Apple Pencil support, it’s got scanning support and file integration, and I can encrypt specific notes that I choose. I also enjoy using the Quick Note feature on iPadOS and macOS that, unfortunately, can only be used within Apple’s own Notes app.

The things Apple Notes is missing are the things that made Craft so great: I’d still love the ability to link to specific notes within other notes, have better designed notes with more graphics and customization options, and I’d love the ability to create notes based on specific calendar events (though I do have a workaround using a Shortcut I created that I’ll share eventually).

All in all, there’s no perfect notes app, but the one that comes built-in is pretty great. If you’re using Apple Notes, however, and it doesn’t have enough features, and you’re looking for something else, then be sure to give Craft notes a try — I doubt you’ll be disappointed and they are continually improving the product.

Header Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.

The April 2021 Apple Event yesterday knocked it out of the park for me. It’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been excited about new Mac hardware. The 2021 iMac using Apple Silicon is the first new Mac designed around the M1 chipset that Apple is developing in house, and the new design is sleek and reminiscent of the first iMacs in terms of their personality.

I’m so glad to see Apple design brining back some personality into the products (and a lost sense of design and aesthetic that I’ve not seen since the 2000s) and embracing color in new and exciting ways that we haven’t seen since the late 90s when it was all on the line for Apple. The Mac has played it safe over the past decade and has gotten more boring and corporate looking with every new shade of gray released. These new Macs, however, breathe new life into the Mac ecosystem and make me very excited to see what the future holds for the Mac.

The M1 chip is changing the heartbeat of the Mac, making it smarter, faster, and stronger against competition. I’m waiting with eagerness (and eager money) for a 16” MacBook Pro and an iMac or other desktop computer that can support developers and the full power and ports it requires.

My current Mac setup includes a 2016 16” MacBook Pro and 2013 Mac Pro that has seen better days, and the new M1 chips smoke every computer that I currently own in performance and battery life.

Apple’s event yesterday was just plain fun, and I’m glad to see that after one of the most devastating years in recent history. There’s not a single product that Apple announced that I questioned: They’re all fantastic and the teams that designed and developed these products deserve to be applauded.

Besides the iMac, I’m certainly excited about the AirTags and the possibilities it brings for being able to track items, bags, and more. I’m already planning to order a 4-pack of these tags for my computer bag, my Nintendo Switch, keys, and more.

I’m also really excited about the iPad Pro. For those that don’t know, I use an iPad Pro daily as my main computing device when I’m not doing development work. I write the overwhelming majority of articles for TechRepublic.com on there, and I also do some Swift Playground work when I don’t want to sit down at my Mac.

The power and performance that Apple is able to pack into the iPad Pro with the M1 chip is astonishing, and I cannot help but think there’s another motive with bringing 16GB RAM to the iPad Pro and the M1 chip (Hello Xcode for iPad Pro? … hey, one can dream can’t they?).

All in all, the Apple event yesterday was a success from my point of view, and it’s hard to believe that we still have WWDC around the corner, then late summer and fall announcements as well. It’s shaping up to be a packed year for Apple and Apple fans everywhere, and I cannot wait to see what else is released in 2021.

I’ve been using Apple’s Notes app on my macOS and iOS devices for years to synchronize bits of text and things that I think I will need to remember in the future.

My Notes app has blossomed into several hundreds of notes, some of which have no titles, and I really don’t know why I kept some of them around. In the mix is also several important notes that I want to keep and hang on to for future reference. For those notes that had some importance, they received a title and were stored away in folders, but accessing them was more than a little difficult.

Over the past week, I’ve been taking time to clear out old notes that I no longer need, or are no longer relevant; however, this left me wondering if there was some better way to store and surface these important piece of text, snippets of code, and other short form documents in a way that could be easier to find and recognize in the future.

I’ve been hearing a lot about two different tools: Obsidian and Craft. I’ve been using Obsidian and Craft for a little over a week in an attempt to better understand these platforms and to see which can provide me the best solution for what I want to do.

So far, Craft is winning the debate only because it has an iOS app, and the macOS app version isn’t an electron app; however, Obsidian at the same time being an electron app, does have the upside of storing documents in Markdown format at rest. This is good for archival because it means that I can easily retrieve the text at any time in the future regardless of if the app has gone the way of the dodo.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be trying to make a decision about which platform I’m going to stick with when it comes to notes, and I’ll keep the blog updated on the solution that I come to choose and the reasons why I choose it.

Do you have any recommendations for note apps or have experience with Obsidian or Craft? I’d love to hear what you’re using and why you’ve chosen it. Drop me a line on Twitter.