The group behind the note-taking app Craft launched a new version this week, after months of beta testing and greater than a yr in growth. It consists of a lot of modifications, however three massive ones: new methods to type your paperwork; a brand new part known as Collections that allows you to compile and arrange associated stuff; and a bunch of recent task-management instruments.
Craft works on Apple units, Home windows, and the net, and the group says Android is coming ultimately. I’ve been testing the beta for the previous few months, and I completely adore it. This new Craft is the very best app I’ve tried for managing each massive tasks and day-to-day life. It’s nonetheless lacking a couple of options, significantly on the to-do listing entrance, however it’s each superbly designed and really highly effective, and it simply works the best way my mind does. I’m an incorrigible tester and switcher of note-taking apps, however I haven’t stop Craft in months. And I don’t plan to.
Craft 3 is definitely a pivot for Craft, or perhaps an un-pivot. Over the previous few years, the corporate began to focus extra on enterprise customers and promoting to firms, co-founder Balint Orosz tells me. It added a lot of permissions-management stuff, advanced sharing instruments, enterprise integrations, and 1,000,000 templates for center managers, all chasing the profitable however elusive B2B market. “We had been not this straightforward product that anybody can undertake,” Orosz says, “however we additionally weren’t advanced sufficient for companies.” Craft acquired caught. That’s additionally roughly after I stopped utilizing the app.
A few yr in the past, although, Orosz and his group simply bailed on that plan and determined to get again to constructing an app for normal individuals. That meant simplifying all the things about the way it works, giving individuals the instruments they really have to handle their life (and, positive, their work) within the app, and ditching the remaining. “We simply stated, ‘let’s construct the very best device that helps you arrange your life,’” Orosz says. “Your complete life.”
Paperwork are nonetheless the core of Craft, however in model 3 there are numerous extra methods so as to add colour, doodles, and backgrounds to them — Craft clearly observed how many individuals like designing their Notion pages and determined to emphasise the identical characteristic. Collections are additionally considerably Notion-like: when you add a group to a web page it turns right into a sortable desk of knowledge and even different paperwork, so you possibly can arrange issues such as you may in a Notion database.
For me, although, it’s the duty integration that makes Craft actually work. There’s a brand new Duties view within the app, which each compiles all of your paperwork with duties inside and offers a spot to only make a standalone to-do listing. Within the Calendar view, you’ll see all of your duties due right now alongside your calendar occasions and day by day notes. Duties can have due dates, however not a lot else — when you’re on the lookout for priorities or recurring duties and even subtasks, you’re higher off elsewhere. Orosz says he’s fantastic with that. Most individuals, he thinks, simply need checkboxes.
I additionally principally need checkboxes, so this setup works for me. The app additionally integrates with Apple Reminders, which is a simple solution to seize new issues. However the Craft characteristic that basically places it excessive is the brand new quick-add window. You faucet it and a textual content field seems — you possibly can write in that textual content field after which select to ship it to your day by day notice, create a brand new notice, or simply add a activity to your inbox. Or you possibly can select to not file it in any respect, and it sits in an inventory on the backside of your display screen. It’s one of many quickest methods I’ve seen to only write one thing down, which few apps handle to get proper.
Craft nonetheless prices $10 a month or $96 a year, although the corporate is working a half-off sale to have fun the replace. For Orosz, this launch is only the start of a brand new model of the app. The group has already built-in notes, duties, and calendar occasions into one place, “and doubtless subsequent yr we’re going to comply with up with individuals as a core entity,” he says. He thinks individuals arrange their lives round essential individuals, as a lot as they do dates and duties, so people ought to be on the middle of Craft.
The group can be engaged on new templates and styling concepts, and are lastly planning to construct a helpful system for tagging paperwork. However they’re additionally newly devoted to only conserving it easy, silly. “If you wish to have a data graph with full 3D zoomable no matter, Obsidian or different extra technical centered instruments will do this job higher for you,” Orosz says. “They’re extendable, they’re much less opinionated.” After years of constructing no matter device some center supervisor requested for, he appears very excited to get again to constructing the one he desires. Which seems to be fairly near the one I need too.