Fundamental shifts of position

Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 16, 2015 at 03:48 PM

You’re right. I tried Workflowy, as well as Omnioutliner (the only rich-text cross-platform outliners around). They’re good, but as you remark, not good enough.

If you’re going to have a couple of apps open on your desktop all the time, they have to be fast and resource-efficient. The same applies (more or less by definition) to the mobile operating system that is iOS.

So I took a closer look at my relatively new acquisition, Keep Everything.

Keep Everything saves web pages you drag and drop onto it as two things: a web archive (usually quite bulky, as those who work regularly with web archives will already know) and an easy-to-read article based on information (text and graphics) extracted from the main part of the web page. Each entry is saved in these two formats; the article is displayed in the list of entries by default, but you can switch between article and full web-page view using a convenient pair of tabs at the top of each page.

Unusually, however, Keep Everything encodes the article in Markdown. The default display is non-editable - but you can edit articles by pressing a simple ‘Edit’ button.

This means you can also use Keep Everything as a Markdown-based notes manager. The ‘Add note’ function in the menu bar allows you to add material directly from the clipboard, by downloading from a URL, or by opening a file from disk.

Or as a ‘New text’ note - meaning, a Markdown note.

The Markdown editor is not sophisticated (no ‘hybrid display’, no menu bar of convenient Markdown shortcuts). But Keep Everything does something I wish all Markdown editors did by default: it displays the read-only formatted web page by default. To edit the underlying Markdown code, you press the ‘Edit’ button. This is much more information-friendly.

Other Markdown editors tend to do one of two things. They either display a hybrid view (Ulysses, Metanota Pro), or they use a dual-pane view (Markdown on left, preview on right). LightPaper is the only Markdown editor that does both of these things - the editing pane displays a hybrid view, and you can toggle the Preview pane on/off as you prefer.

But Keep Everything displays the fully formatted preview by default. The app is, after all, optimised for viewing web pages. For me, that’s a big plus. If I’m scanning quickly through information, I like that information to be clearly formatted, ergo easy to evaluate. Even a hybrid view is annoying.

So why not use Keep Everything as the information manager for managing ALL my day-to-day information?