Craft 3.0

Posted by satis
Nov 29, 2024 at 08:51 PM

Frankly, I’m pretty excited by it. The new Tasks area is killer, roping in all upcoming tasks in one place from all your documents and lists (and showing you where they reside, and letting you add/edit in those docs from the Tasks view), while also being a location to make separate lists outside existing notes.

Similarly, the Calendar view brings in all dated/timed items from various notes and tasks, and lets you add new items inside the calendar view.

This seems like the Noteplan-ification of Craft, but Craft has always seemed stronger in crafting notes (especially longer notes). Interestingly they’re the same price (excepting Craft’s 50% off Black Friday deals).

The article points out that substasks are absent, but it fails to point out that recurring tasks are currently missing in action too—which for me means I can’t replace my task app with it. To its credit it supports the most common Markdown elements… but it isn’t fully Markdown compliant.

https://support.craft.do/hc/en-us/articles/360019555597-Markdown-Style-Shortcuts

I’ve simplified my Task management: when Todoist started having sync and reminder problems this spring (right after I resubscribed in my 6th year), I spent half a day and copied over everything to Apple Reminders, which I’d previously neglected because of its comparative primitiveness. But Apple has improved Reminders a lot in recent years, and even after Todoist got its act together a month later I stayed with Reminders… which now has one-way integration with Apple Calendar.

I’m pretty satisfied with this free solution, and despite a lot of advancements in Todoist (like a new built-in calendar) I currently have a Reminder to cancel my Todoist resub in March.

But nearly all the task-oriented management apps have weak-to-nonexistent notetaking capabilities. It’s left to apps like NotePlan, Agenda and Supernotes to integrate tasks, calendar and good notetaking (both calendar-based and not). You could hack much of this in Notion too… but it’d be a hack, and these apps (and Craft) have native desktop apps which run much more smoothly, better following OS UI guidelines that users are used to.

The most affordable of these apps remains Agenda, but Craft’s free tier is intriguing and possibly useful enough for a lot of people: 10 free documents, plus 2 additional free documents per month.