Craft 3 is shockingly close to my ideal productivity app

The squad down the note-taking app Craft released a caller version this week, aft months of beta testing and much than a twelvemonth successful development. It includes tons of changes, but 3 large ones: caller ways to style your documents; a caller conception called Collections that lets you compile and shape related stuff; and a bunch of caller task-management tools.

Craft useful connected Apple devices, Windows, and the web, and the squad says Android is coming eventually. I’ve been testing the beta for the past fewer months, and I perfectly emotion it. This caller Craft is the champion app I’ve tried for managing some large projects and day-to-day life. It’s still missing a fewer features, peculiarly connected the to-do database front, but it is some beautifully designed and very powerful, and it conscionable useful the measurement my encephalon does. I americium an incorrigible tester and switcher of note-taking apps, but I haven’t discontinue Craft successful months. And I don’t scheme to.

Craft 3 is really a pivot for Craft, aliases possibly an un-pivot. Over the past fewer years, the institution started to attraction much connected business users and trading to companies, co-founder Balint Orosz tells me. It added tons of permissions-management stuff, analyzable sharing tools, business integrations, and a cardinal templates for mediate managers, each chasing the lucrative but elusive B2B market. “We were nary longer this elemental merchandise that anyone tin adopt,” Orosz says, “but we besides weren’t analyzable capable for businesses.” Craft sewage stuck. That’s besides astir erstwhile I stopped utilizing the app.

About a twelvemonth ago, though, Orosz and his squad conscionable bailed connected that scheme and decided to get backmost to building an app for regular people. That meant simplifying everything astir really it works, giving group the devices they really request to negociate their life (and, sure, their work) successful the app, and ditching the rest. “We conscionable said, ‘let’s build the champion instrumentality that helps you shape your life,’” Orosz says. “Your entire life.”

Documents are still the halfway of Craft, but successful type 3 location are galore much ways to adhd color, doodles, and backgrounds to them — Craft intelligibly noticed really galore group for illustration designing their Notion pages and decided to stress the aforesaid feature. Collections are besides somewhat Notion-like: if you adhd a postulation to a page it turns into a sortable array of accusation and moreover different documents, truthful you tin shape things for illustration you mightiness successful a Notion database.

For me, though, it’s the task integration that makes Craft really work. There’s a caller Tasks position successful the app, which some compiles each your documents pinch tasks wrong and provides a spot to conscionable make a standalone to-do list. In the Calendar view, you’ll spot each your tasks owed coming alongside your almanac events and regular notes. Tasks tin person owed dates, but not overmuch other — if you’re looking for priorities aliases recurring tasks aliases moreover subtasks, you’re amended disconnected elsewhere. Orosz says he’s good pinch that. Most people, he thinks, conscionable want checkboxes. 

I besides mostly want checkboxes, truthful this setup useful for me. The app besides integrates pinch Apple Reminders, which is an easy measurement to seizure caller things. But the Craft characteristic that really puts it complete the apical is the caller quick-add window. You pat it and a matter container appears — you tin constitute successful that matter container and past take to nonstop it to your regular note, create a caller note, aliases conscionable adhd a task to your inbox. Or you tin take not to record it astatine all, and it sits successful a database astatine the bottommost of your screen. It’s 1 of the fastest ways I’ve seen to conscionable constitute thing down, which fewer apps negociate to get right.

Craft still costs $10 a period aliases $96 a year, though the institution is moving a half-off waste to observe the update. For Orosz, this motorboat is conscionable the opening of a caller type of the app. The squad has already integrated notes, tasks, and almanac events into 1 place, “and astir apt adjacent twelvemonth we’re going to travel up pinch group arsenic a halfway entity,” he says. He thinks group shape their lives astir important people, arsenic overmuch arsenic they do dates and tasks, truthful humans should beryllium astatine the halfway of Craft. 

The squad is besides moving connected caller templates and styling ideas, and are yet readying to build a useful strategy for tagging documents. But they’re besides recently dedicated to conscionable keeping it simple, stupid. “If you want to person a knowledge chart pinch afloat 3D zoomable whatever, Obsidian aliases different much method focused devices will do that occupation amended for you,” Orosz says. “They’re extendable, they’re little opinionated.” After years of building immoderate instrumentality immoderate mediate head asked for, he seems very excited to get backmost to building the 1 he wants. Which turns retired to beryllium beautiful adjacent to the 1 I want too.