Feedback on the forevernotes approach

tr4jan

Greetings,

As it is hard to find any other opportunity to send direct feedback regarding experiences with the forevernotes approach, I´ll do it at this place.

I tried the approach, making the effort to link at least the months, quarters and the days of one month to get a feeling on its workflow.

Since iOS 18 and MacOS 15 inaugurated new note features around collapsing note content, my Notes Apps (iOS and MacOS) became very laggy. Accessing a note could take up to two seconds, lags in scrolling appear and so on. An issue many people according to the Apple Support Community suffer. Apple is aware of that but has not yet seen fit to fix it. Which is one reason I can’t gather a reasonable benefit of the forevernotes approach for the time being. The other main hindrance concerning my personal workflow is that I already utilise a certain method of managing the content forevernotes adresses and beyond; thus it is despite I very much love the Notes app as a centre of information, not beneficial for me.

Nevertheless, this has not prevented me from taking a look at the forevernotes approach and would like to share the following observations with those responsible from the perspective of a potential user:

Forever Notes Website
- Home > Components > Links
- First text indicates “There are two main types of links:” but then continues with three list points. (Inconsistency ?)
- Home > Components > ✱ Home
- Picture of Home note displays “Calendar” heading while this is called “Journal” at present (inconsistency ?)
- Picture of Home note displays “Areas”, which is allegedly named “Hubs” at present (inconsistency ?)
Journal
- Shortcut description misses imho a hint, that if you press that, the shortcut will kinda block the notes app for some minutes as it creates 366+ Notes for a year
- You advise to format the linked days in a monthly note “monostyled”. A potential beneficiary addition: To color (highlight) at least Sundays in a different colour (for better optical distinction)
Linking
- Is as announced a tearing task. Perhaps the template structure of forevernotes could be provided with all the linking ready as a potential payed service. (suggestion) Caveat: This would provide forevernotes knowledge about a user's Apple ID
Language
- Everything is in English, but the days created by the script have german names (Januar instead of January, Februar instead of February etc.). Perhaps because the system language of my device is set to German? In any case, it happens and then requires replacing the month names with English for the sake of consistency
Approach in general
- I utilise the Google principle and general working with an inbox solely (for a reason). Relying on that the most recent notes are therefore quite at the top of the notes list. The caveat with the forevernotes approach is that this then congests my note list / dominates the sequence of the note list (which is assorted by date of change deliberately), which is interfering permanently with how I manage my notes in general as mentioned above.

So, looking into the forevernotes approach I learned about layered linking. It is a well thought out, comprehensive approach which will hopefully continue to flourish in the future. At present I highly doubt that anyone except "geeks" take it upon themselves to manually insert the hundreds of links.
-tr4jan

mettlerr

tr4jan I personally just don’t do the “Journaling” approach Forever Notes suggests, and do it as I always did it (one big list with log entries with date in the first column).

For my own benefit, I took the part of the Forever Notes system that are advantageous for me, and left the ones out that are not (for me personally). That is the beauty of using a System, and not an App, where you can’t always choose the functionality.

tr4jan

mettlerr Sounds patent. That's right, the variability of the Notes app is its great strength. Nevertheless, I naturally try to use and evaluate a system/approach as it is designed. As they say, no improvement without feedback.