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.
Read itNotes 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.
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.
Read it10,001 database statements and 101 MB to render 140 characters of text, four times a launch. Six measured performance problems, and what each one cost.
Read itThe 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.
Read itLocking 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.
Read itSync, 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.
Read itApple takes $99 a year before a single copy sells. Here is what the ten dollars actually has to pay for, and the obligation that starts the moment someone buys.
Read itNo 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.
Read itNinety-nine dollars a year, a certificate and an automated malware scan. What Apple actually asks of an independent developer shipping outside the App Store.
Read itFifteen 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itYou 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.
Read itMost 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itTwo 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.
Read itIt is the broadest permission macOS hands out, it has nothing to do with accessibility, and a clipboard manager genuinely cannot work without it.
Read itYour 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.
Read itApple 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.
Read itNobody 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.
Read itMost 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.
Read itAn encrypted local database with no password written down is unrecoverable, by design. That is a feature until it is a problem for somebody else.
Read itLearning 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.
Read itPay 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itEverything 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.
Read itOpen 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.
Read itClipboard 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itYou 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.
Read itHighlights 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.
Read itYou 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itSearch 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.
Read itAn 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.
Read itTwo 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itDark 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.
Read itMost 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itEveryone 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.
Read itYou have about six weeks where you can ask anything without embarrassment, and where you notice things everyone else stopped seeing. Both expire.
Read itMost 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.
Read itYou 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itThe explanation that finally worked was invented on the spot and forgotten by Friday. Writing it down is the highest-return note nobody takes.
Read itA 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.
Read itMost 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itWiki 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itTen 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.
Read itForty applications, six stages each, and no memory of which recruiter said what. A board and one note per company beats any tracker template.
Read itThree 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itYou cannot remember what you thought would happen, because you have already updated. Five lines written before the outcome is the only fix there is.
Read itA 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.
Read itThe handover document nobody reads is the one listing your responsibilities. The one people need answers questions, and it takes an afternoon to write.
Read itA 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itAdvice 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.
Read itThere 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.
Read itNo 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itAsk-your-notes-anything means sending your notes somewhere. What each kind of AI feature actually transmits, and which ones can run on your machine.
Read itEvery 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.
Read itThe bot joined, recorded everything and produced a summary. You still do not know what you agreed. Transcription solved capture, which was never the problem.
Read itEveryone 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.
Read itYou 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.
Read itThe 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.
Read itNotion 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.
Read itProse 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itMost 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itMost customisation is procrastination wearing a colour picker. Four settings are not, and they change how much of your own writing you actually read.
Read itMaccy 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itNotes 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.
Read itSigning 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.
Read itMost 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.
Read itA 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.
Read itLocking 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.
Read itAlmost 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.
Read itFolders, 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.
Read itmacOS keeps exactly one thing on the clipboard and forgets the rest. Here is what the system really offers, why nothing brings back what you copied, and what does.
Read itCloud 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.
Read itLocal-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.
Read itA 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.
Read itNotion, 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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