All-in-one productivity apps for Mac, and who each one is for
Apple's own apps, Notion, Obsidian, NotePlan, Lunatask, Craft, Akiflow, Sunsama and Cyanote: what each one combines, what it costs, and who should pick it.
Read itThe Cyanote blog
Notes on keeping notes, running a week without ceremony, and what it means to own the files your thinking lives in. Written by the person who builds Cyanote.
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A to-do list with reminders on Windows, without a Microsoft account
Microsoft To Do needs an account and keeps tasks on Exchange Online. What else Windows offers for tasks and reminders, and a local list that asks for nothing.
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How to password-protect notes on Windows
What Windows can lock and what it cannot: OneNote section passwords, Sticky Notes, Notepad, BitLocker, encrypted archives, and an app that locks one note.
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One notes app on a Mac and a PC, without sync
A Mac at home, a Windows PC at work, one notes app on both and no cloud between them. How notes move across on purpose, and when two sets is right.
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A notes app for Windows that never asks you to sign in
What Notepad, Sticky Notes and OneNote actually need from you on a Windows PC, when one of them is enough, and what a local notes app with no sign-in looks like.
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Markdown and text files on Windows: what opens them, and what keeps them
A .md file is plain text, and Windows already has three ways to open one. What Notepad, VS Code and default apps do, when that is enough, and when it is not.
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Clipboard history on Windows
Windows has a clipboard history built in. Here is how to turn it on, what it actually keeps, why it empties itself, and when a clipboard manager is worth installing.
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A calendar on Windows without signing in
Windows Mail and Calendar are gone and the new Outlook is built around accounts. What is left for a calendar that stays on your PC, and when to sign in anyway.
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There is no Notepad on a Mac
macOS ships no equivalent of Notepad, and each near-miss fails in a specific way. What TextEdit, Stickies and Apple Notes get right, and where they do not.
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Leaving Day One, when the journal is just notes with dates
Day One is the best journalling app there is, and leaving is rarely about quality. Who should stay, what the export preserves, and what you give up.
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iCloud Notes, explained properly
Where your notes really are, why sync is not a backup, and exactly what happens when storage runs out, you turn iCloud Notes off, or you sign out.
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Free notes apps for Mac
Most people wanting a free notes app on a Mac should open Apple Notes and stop reading. If not, the word free is hiding four different business models.
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Apple Notes on a Windows PC
There is no Apple Notes application for Windows and there never has been. Here is what actually reaches your notes from a PC, and what each route costs you.
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When Apple Notes will not sync
You wrote it on the phone and it is not on the Mac. The order to check things in, why none of the causes announce themselves, and how to make it cost less.
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The paper you read twice
You have read this before. You remember the argument, not the verdict, and cannot find the note. Research reading fails differently from ordinary reading.
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The experiment that worked and cannot be repeated
It worked on Tuesday. The same script gives a different number today and nothing in the record says what changed. The missing variable is almost never in the code.
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The deposit you get back is the one you photographed
A deposit dispute is settled two years later by whoever kept evidence. The agent has a file and a process. Most tenants have a memory of the flat.
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The bill that was an estimate
A bill arrives and the only thing you can tell about it is that it is bigger than last time. Sixty seconds a month is the difference between knowing and hoping.
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Proving you owned it
After a burglary or a flood an insurer asks what you had and how you know. Most people cannot answer either, because the proof was in the room.
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Notes from year one, read in year four
You open a note in your own words and a stranger wrote it. Context is free when you write and costs everything when you read it four years later.
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Getting paid is a separate job from doing the work
Sending the invoice feels like the last step of the project. It is the first step of a different one, and the freelancers paid on time know it.
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A house has a service history and nobody keeps it
A car worth fifteen thousand comes with a service book. A house worth twenty times that comes with a drawer of manuals and a vague handover.
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Raycast's clipboard history, and its three-month edge
Raycast keeps three months of clipboard history on the free plan. Here is what that limit actually means, and when a separate app is the better answer.
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Leaving Todoist, and the five-project free tier
Todoist's free plan stops at five projects and Pro is $60 a year. Here is what the subscription genuinely buys, and when a bought-once task list is enough.
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Leaving OneNote on a Mac, where the app is the problem
OneNote is free, generous and built for Windows first. On a Mac the complaint is rarely features — it is the app itself, and the notebook format underneath it.
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Leaving Obsidian, when you wanted an app and got a system
Obsidian is free, keeps your notes as files and does more than almost anything. The reason people leave is not a missing feature — it is the maintenance.
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Leaving Maccy, when free stops being the point
Maccy is free, open source and genuinely good. The reasons to leave it are not feature complaints — they are about where the clipboard sits in the rest of your day.
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Leaving Google Keep, when the notes outgrew the sticky
Keep is free, syncs everywhere and has no Mac app. Here is when the sticky-note model stops fitting, and what to check before you move your notes off it.
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Leaving Craft, and the 1,500-block ceiling
Craft's free plan stops at 1,500 blocks — paragraphs, not documents. Here is what that limit means in practice, and when a local app is the better answer.
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Leaving Bear, and what the subscription actually buys
Bear Pro is $2.99 a month, and the free tier keeps your notes local. Here is exactly what the subscription is funding, and when buying once makes more sense.
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Where to keep the things you must not lose
Recovery codes, passport numbers, the insurance policy. Most of it should not be in your notes — but the map should. How to keep an index without the secrets.
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What not to write down in your personal notes
Notes outlive the situation that produced them, get restored to new machines and read by other people. Five categories to keep out, and where each belongs.
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The screenshots on this site are generated
Nobody photographs this app by hand. A script seeds a database, drives the interface and shoots it — which makes the marketing images a test that fails loudly.
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The one note you should never tidy
Every organised system needs one unorganised place to land in. What goes in a scratch note, why it must be a single note, and the ten minutes that stop it rotting.
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The app said "Saved", and had saved nothing
A success message with nothing behind it, a paste that discarded its own error text, and a poll that quietly retired. Four swallowed failures, and the rule.
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The animation that stole its own poster's score
A 710 KB hero animation replaced the still it was meant to hide behind, while the browser was still deciding what to time. Three problems in one element.
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Porting to Windows from a Mac I can't run it on
Half the Windows work is code that cannot run on the machine writing it. What that changes, and the week a compile error had nowhere at all to surface.
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Dictating notes on a Mac, and what to do with what comes out
Talking is three times faster than typing and much worse at structure. Where dictation helps, where it costs more than it saves, and the five-minute pass after.
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Closing a project so the notes still make sense in a year
Projects end without ceremony and their notes rot in place. An hour of close-out is what makes them findable a year later, when somebody asks you why.
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A tour is a good reminder and a bad introduction
The tour pointed at things already on screen. The two facts a new user most needed were about a feature living outside the window, and their right to switch it off.
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What your clipboard manager is not supposed to remember
A convention lets a password manager say do not record this. It works only if both apps honour it — how it works, and how to test yours in thirty seconds.
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Two colour tokens, forty-three failing elements
An audit listed 43 failing elements on this site. They were two hex values, each a tenth of a ratio short — and, in the app, white on colours users pick.
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Three ways to leave, and one way back in
The red button hides the window, Command-Q holds the quit until the last edit lands, and an update did neither. Three exits, down three code paths.
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The migration you edited after it shipped
A migration that has already run never runs again. Editing one changes what new installs get and nothing else: two schemas, and no error anywhere.
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The green tick that meant nothing
A build that only worked because of a cached file, a CI run that tested nothing, and a release check that read the old bytes back. None of it evidence.
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The backup that would have wiped the clipboard
A restore clears the tables a backup does not mention. Leave the clipboard out to keep the daily file small, and every restore quietly erases it.
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Moving to a new Mac without losing the way you work
Migration Assistant moves your files and mostly gets it right. What it cannot move is permissions, licences, and anything outside your user folder.
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Markdown or rich text: which should you actually write in
The argument is usually about syntax and should be about storage. What each one genuinely wins at, where the difference disappears, and the question that settles it.
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Getting your notes out, and what breaks on the way
Every notes app has an export button. What matters is what survives it — links between notes, images, checkboxes, dates. How to find out before you need to know.
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What belongs on the calendar, and what belongs on a list
A calendar is for things that happen whether you show up or not. A list is for everything else. The test that sorts them, and why mixing the two ruins both.
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When the clipboard ate the database
On a real install the clipboard was 42.8 MB of a 44.8 MB database, and 80 screenshots were all of it. A row limit does not bound bytes. What replaced it.
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The sidebar read every note to draw a list of titles
10,001 database statements and 101 MB to render 140 characters of text, four times a launch. Six measured performance problems, and what each one cost.
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The paste that landed in the wrong app
The popup synthesised Cmd-V into whatever was frontmost and assumed it was your app. Sometimes it was Cyanote. The race, and how it was made impossible.
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The half-second that left a locked note in the clear
Locking a note took 138 milliseconds. The save it raced was scheduled 500 milliseconds earlier, and the gap wrote the plaintext back to disk underneath it.
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The features I said no to
Sync, an iPhone app, collaboration, AI, plugins and telemetry. Six things people ask for, the reason each one is a no, and what saying no actually costs me.
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The arithmetic of a $7.99 app
Apple takes $99 a year before a single copy sells. Here is what the $7.99 actually has to pay for, and the obligation that starts the moment someone buys.
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Supporting an app that doesn't know who you are
No account means no password reset, no dashboard and no way to look you up. What support actually looks like when the app knows nothing about its users.
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Signing and notarising, from the developer's side
Ninety-nine dollars a year, a certificate and an automated malware scan. What Apple actually asks of an independent developer shipping outside the App Store.
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One SQLite file, and the whole data model
Fifteen tables, 26 shipped migrations and a lock file that refuses to let me edit history. A tour of where your work sits, and what keeps it there.
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It worked in dev and was broken in every build
The Format button failed in every shipped copy and worked perfectly in development. Type checking, linting, the tests and CI all passed. Here is the gap.
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Write it down the first time you work it out
You have solved the same problem three times. Each time it took forty minutes. The note that would have made it four takes ninety seconds to write.
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Writing an incident review people will read
Most postmortems get filed and never opened again. The ones that change anything share a structure, and it is not the template your company hands you.
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When a notes app is the wrong place for a long document
A notes app is excellent for the first 3,000 words of anything and starts failing quietly after that. Here are the four points where it breaks.
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Why a notes app should open instantly
Two seconds is not a performance problem, it is a behaviour problem. What a slow launch actually costs, and the four things that make one slow.
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Why a Mac app asks for Accessibility permission
It is the broadest permission macOS hands out, it has nothing to do with accessibility, and a clipboard manager genuinely cannot work without it.
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Where your notes actually live on a Mac
Your data stays on your device" is a claim with a file path behind it. Here is how to find that path in any app, and what to do once you have it.
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When it is actually worth moving off Apple Notes
Apple Notes is free, fast and already installed, and most people should keep it. Here are the four reasons that genuinely justify leaving — and one that does not.
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What to delete from your notes
Nobody deletes notes, because storage is free and deletion feels like loss. The cost is not disk space — it is that search starts returning things you do not want.
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What still works with the wifi off
Most apps that call themselves offline just queue your changes until the connection returns. That is a different promise. Here is how to tell in advance.
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What happens to your notes when you die
An encrypted local database with no password written down is unrecoverable, by design. That is a feature until it is a problem for somebody else.
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Using a notes app without touching the mouse
Learning forty shortcuts is not the goal and never works. Four of them carry almost all the value in any notes app, and the rest can stay unlearned forever.
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Typing a task the way you would say it
Pay rent tomorrow 9am !high" should become a task with a date, a time and a priority. Why that one detail decides whether a to-do list survives a month.
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Two Macs, one system, no sync
A desktop and a laptop is a harder problem than a phone, because you do real work on both. Four arrangements, and the one question that picks between them.
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Travel notes that work when the connection does not
Everything you need abroad is behind a login, in an app that wants a connection, on a phone with no data. Twenty minutes before you leave fixes it.
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The forty tabs you are keeping open
Open tabs are a to-do list with no dates, no priorities and no way to search it. Every one is there for one of four reasons, and each has a different fix.
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The snippets you retype every week
Clipboard history is for what you copied. Snippets are for what you paste over and over. They look like the same feature and solve opposite problems.
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The first week with a new notes app
The setup weekend is what kills the system three months later. Here is the version that takes ten minutes and leaves the structure to be discovered.
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The productivity app you keep replacing
You have set up seven systems in five years and abandoned all of them. That is a pattern with a cause, and the cause is almost never the app.
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Taking notes on what you read, without a highlighting app
Highlights are not notes. They are a record of what interested you for four seconds. Here is what to do instead, and how much less of it there is.
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Staying informed without drowning in it
You read four hours a week and could not summarise any of it. The problem is not the volume of what you read. It is that none of it was written down.
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Software for a Mac that is a few years old
A 2018 MacBook is not slow. It is running software written for a machine with twice the memory. Here is what to look for, and what to stop installing.
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What makes a notes app's search actually good
Search is the most-used feature in a notes app and the least designed. Three different things get called search, and only one survives a thousand notes.
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Screenshots and images in your notes
An image in a note is either a file inside your database or a link to somebody's server. The difference is invisible until the day it is a grey box.
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Revising without a flashcard app
Two techniques do nearly all the work in revision, and neither needs software. Making cards is not one of them, which is why building a deck feels productive.
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Reminders you do not start ignoring
A reminder you swipe away has not failed to fire. It has trained you to swipe. Here is why notification systems decay, and the smaller setup that survives.
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Reading and writing at night without the glare
Dark mode is not automatically easier on the eyes, and for some people it is worse. What reduces strain is three settings, none of them the colour scheme.
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Planning a day you will actually follow
Most day plans fail by 10:40. Not because the method is wrong, but because the plan was written by someone with no information about the day.
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Planning something with a fixed date and many suppliers
A wedding, a conference, a milestone party. One immovable date, a dozen suppliers, and the same three failures every time — none of which is the budget.
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The small text tools you keep pasting work data into
Everyone has a bookmark for a JSON formatter and a JWT decoder. Few of us think about where that paste goes. Here is the real risk, and the boring fix.
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What to write down in your first ninety days
You have about six weeks where you can ask anything without embarrassment, and where you notice things everyone else stopped seeing. Both expire.
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The notes that make a one-to-one worth having
Most 1:1s decay into a status update because neither person prepared. Four lines each, written before, plus one note per person, is the entire difference.
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Taking notes while learning a new codebase
You will trace the same call path three times in your first month. Writing it down once is the difference, and it is a specific kind of note.
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The notes that help when you are learning a language
The app handles vocabulary. What it cannot handle is the sentence you wanted to say and could not, which is the most useful thing you produce all week.
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Notes for the third time you explain something
The explanation that finally worked was invented on the spot and forgotten by Friday. Writing it down is the highest-return note nobody takes.
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Surviving a house move on notes
A move is four months of small facts arriving from eleven organisations. The failures are always the same three, and none of them is the packing.
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Note templates people actually keep using
Most note templates are abandoned within a fortnight, and it is nearly always the same three design mistakes. What separates a template you use from one you delete.
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When macOS says it cannot verify an app
The warning is not a virus alert and it is not nothing. Here is what Gatekeeper actually checked, what changed in recent macOS, and when to walk away.
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Linking notes without building a second brain
Wiki links and backlinks are a genuinely good idea buried under a genuinely exhausting methodology. Here is the small version that pays for itself in a week.
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Life admin, in one place you will actually check
The renewal you missed, the warranty you could not find, the reference number in a 2023 email. Life admin fails in three ways, and all three are fixable.
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Leaving Evernote, fifteen years later
The hard part is not choosing where to go. It is that a decade of notes has become a place you live, and the export is the only thing that makes leaving reversible.
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Keeping your own health notes
Ten minutes with a doctor goes better when you arrive with dates and specifics rather than impressions. Here is what to write, and where it should not go.
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Keeping track of a job search without a spreadsheet
Forty applications, six stages each, and no memory of which recruiter said what. A board and one note per company beats any tracker template.
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Keeping client work straight without project management software
Three clients is not a portfolio needing software. It is three sets of notes, dates and promises — and the failure is always the same one, in the same place.
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Keeping a log for something you practise
The training app tracks numbers and misses the one thing that makes a log useful: what you noticed. Four lines a session, and the pattern shows up in a year.
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Keeping a decision journal
You cannot remember what you thought would happen, because you have already updated. Five lines written before the outcome is the only fix there is.
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When you inherit somebody else's notes
A colleague left, or a relative died, and now you have their files. The first decision is not how to organise them. It is whether to read them at all.
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Handing over your work before you leave
The handover document nobody reads is the one listing your responsibilities. The one people need answers questions, and it takes an afternoon to write.
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Getting a note to your phone without sync
A local-first app has no phone client, and that is the real cost of it. Here are the four honest workarounds, and the one question that decides if they are enough.
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Checklists for the things you do every week
A recurring task tells you to do the thing. A routine tells you what the thing consists of. The difference is why some weekly jobs keep half-finishing.
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When remembering to write it down is the hard part
Advice about note-taking assumes you will remember to take the note. For some people that assumption is the entire problem, and the fix is structural.
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Seeing your calendar without signing into it
There is a middle option between typing everything twice and handing an app your Google account. It is called an ICS subscription, and it is read-only.
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How to tell whether an app phones home
No telemetry" is a claim, and claims are checkable. Here is how to see exactly what an app on your Mac sends, without trusting anybody's privacy page.
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Where ideas go before you are ready to write them
The good idea arrives while you are doing something else, and it will not wait. What to capture, in what form, so it is still usable in six months.
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AI features in a notes app, and what they cost
Ask-your-notes-anything means sending your notes somewhere. What each kind of AI feature actually transmits, and which ones can run on your machine.
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The work log that saves you at review time
Every year you sit down to write your own review and cannot remember January. Two lines a week fixes it, and the fix takes about ninety seconds.
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A transcript is not a note
The bot joined, recorded everything and produced a summary. You still do not know what you agreed. Transcription solved capture, which was never the problem.
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A someday list that is not a graveyard
Everyone has two hundred things they will never do, in a list they stopped opening. The list is not the problem. Never deleting anything from it is.
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A journal that stays private
You will not write honestly in a document that might be read. Which makes where a journal lives a writing question first, and a security question second.
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Keeping in touch, without a personal CRM
The apps for this fail because they turn friendship into a pipeline. One note per person and one honest rule does the useful part without the queasiness.
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What you give up leaving Notion, and what you get back
Notion is genuinely good at things a local app cannot do. It is also slow to open and gone when the connection is. Here is the trade, stated plainly.
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Writing and code are two different kinds of attention
Prose forgives you and code does not. Moving between the two costs more than the two seconds it looks like — here is how to make the switch smaller.
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Tracking habits without a separate app for it
A habit tracker works by being seen daily. A fifth dock icon is least likely to get that. What changes when the streak lives next to the rest of your day.
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A Pomodoro timer that's already in the app you're working in
A focus timer works until switching to it is its own distraction. What that costs when the timer lives in a separate app, and what changes when it doesn't.
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Notes and code, in the same app
Most people keep their writing in one app and their snippets in another. There is a real reason for the split — and a real cost to it. Here is both.
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A calendar that lives next to your notes and your to-dos
A calendar tells you what is happening. It cannot tell you why, or what you meant to bring. Here is what changes when it sits next to the notes that explain it.
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Making a notes app fit your eyes
Most customisation is procrastination wearing a colour picker. Four settings are not, and they change how much of your own writing you actually read.
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When a free clipboard manager stops being enough
Maccy and Raycast clipboard history are free and well made. Here are the real limits of each, so you can tell whether you have hit one or only think you have.
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What $7.99, once, actually buys
A one-time price is not simply cheaper than a subscription. Here is what buying software outright buys you, and the one thing it cannot promise.
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Keeping your clipboard and your notes in the same place
A clipboard manager catches things for now. A notes app keeps them for later. Here is what it costs to run those two halves as two separate apps.
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What happens to your notes when the app shuts down
Notes apps close. The good ones give you a month and an export file. Here is what that month actually asks of you, and how to be ready before it arrives.
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A notes app that never asks you to sign up
Signing up is so normal that nobody asks what the account is for. Here is what it buys, what it costs, and how to check whether an app truly needs one.
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A clipboard manager for Mac without a subscription
Most Mac clipboard managers now rent themselves to you monthly. Here is what the subscription is actually paying for, and what the one-time options give up.
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Personal Kanban: a board for your own to-do list
A Kanban board built for a team does not survive being handed to one person. Here is which parts translate, which columns to use, and when a plain list wins.
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How to password-protect a note on your Mac
Locking a note, encrypting a disk and using a login password protect against three different things. Here is which one stops what, and where each of them stops.
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Note apps without a subscription
Almost every note app is rented now. Here is why that happened, what a one-time purchase should actually include, and the questions to ask before you pay for either.
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Folders, tags, or search: how to organise notes
Folders, tags and search solve three different problems, and most note systems collapse because they use the wrong one. Here is what each is actually good at.
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How to see clipboard history on a Mac
macOS 26 added a clipboard history inside Spotlight. How to turn it on, how long it keeps things, what older Macs have instead, and when a manager is worth it.
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How to back up notes that live on your own computer
Cloud apps hand you backup as a side effect. Local notes do not, and sync is not a substitute. Here is what actually protects them, and how to know it works.
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What local-first actually means for your notes
Local-first means your notes live on your computer and the app reads them directly. Here is what that buys you, what it really costs, and who should avoid it.
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The weekly review, in 20 minutes
A weekly review that fits in twenty minutes, with the checklist and the timings. Four passes, a timer, and the three mistakes that make people quit early.
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I replaced five subscriptions with one $7.99 app
Notion, Todoist, Fantastical, Streaks and Paste cost me about $260 a year, and I still lost things in the gaps between them. Here is what I built instead.
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