Preface
In a time when everybody on X is hyping up the newest release of Craft Docs, I have a few counterpoints to make. But first, let’s take a look at the product.
Craft is a mostly Apple-only product, with Windows and Web as relatively recent releases to perhaps cater to more adaption, that has eight coatings of visual polish for every knob that does something functional. Seriously, even though the general app quality on Apple devices is exceptional, Craft stands on top of that list, on a pedestal that goes as high as attention to detail can; Craft is beautiful to look at, and it’s a pleasure to play around. With the newly added calendar and tasks section, one of my favourite features is being able to add an “Event Note.” Something I am really, really sore about, in Obsidian.
It’s got offline mode! In fact, while I write this article on a flight, Craft is almost fully functional, and all my data is available on my iPhone.
To be fair, I had tried out Craft before when I got a Setapp subscription but the general opinion around the beginning of this year was that they were pivoting to a teamspace / workspace for enterprises, rather than notetakers and knowledge builders like me. It was a great-looking app then too but because of change in direction, I didn’t pay much heed to it. There’s also at least one other person who migrated out of it because of the pivoting.
The Verge summarises it best:
“We were no longer this simple product that anyone can adopt,” Orosz says, “but we also weren’t complex enough for businesses.” Craft got stuck. That’s also roughly when I stopped using the app.
After years of building whatever tool some middle manager asked for, he seems very excited to get back to building the one he wants. Which turns out to be pretty close to the one I want too.
Le Resistance
Even with all of Craft’s qualities (that I’m immensely swayed by) and its recently acquired tasks and calendar support (which make saying no a herculean task), I’ve decided that it’s not for me. Here’s how I reasoned it out in my head:
I Live In My Calendar
The calendar is my journal, the calendar is my day planner, the calendar is my task manager; it’s my gospel. Did I mention calendars are great?
As somebody who’s gotten so used to logging in my calendar, the quick add / quick entry natural language is second nature to me now. “Oh, did I just spend the last 30 minutes scrolling on X? Let me log that,” “Oh, was that an hour of SwiftUI? let me log that too.” It doesn’t matter what I’ve been doing; it’s very essential that it exists on my calendar, not only for accountability but also for my doubting self next week, month or even year (if I make it!).
What would be even better is if there were some easy interoperability between my notes app and my calendar. Craft does have this! But the calendar is read-only. There is no ability to manipulate anything.
As of the initial V3 release, if there are too many past events, I cannot see them or refer to them in any note that I want. Interlinked thought is very essential to me, and craft fills only a quarter of that plate.
Tasks Belong in Another App
One of my favourite qualities of plaintext tasks (like in Obsidian) is here ability to take notes anywhere and refer to them anywhere I want. One of my least favourite qualities about plaintext tasks is the effort it requires to input, manage and see tasks. I don’t live in Obsidian, I live in Fantastical. Having tasks in my calendar is the best thing I’ve done towards finishing them on time. If not in my calendar, I would like to be able to see them on my home screen, on my Mac, or anywhere outside the app… and much like with Obsidian, that’s not possible in Craft as tasks support is rather rudimentary right now.
Tasks are best left to a dedicated task manager like TickTick, Things 3 of Reminders (via GoodTask). Then some sort of manual interlinking via app uri results, with some friction, in the least amount of hacking around.
Tasks should automatically be Reminders
I love that Craft differentiates between when I’m going to do the task (schedule) and when it needs to be done (deadline). But I find it odd that reminders aren’t automatically added when a task is scheduled. In fact, reminders don’t even work correctly when offline.
Notes are just okay
Note-taking in Craft supports the same level of back-linking as Notion does, which is to say that it’s on a surface level. There are no unlinked mentions, no ability to customise the display text of a link, and obviously no way to extend anything.
The daily journal/calendar pages are a neat addition, but without a proper high-level visual of daily notes talking to other pages, information is isolated, available only through search, and most likely lost.
Importing works only for text
One of the best ways to make it easy for people to transition to your product is to make the import process as frictionless as possible. However, Craft’s markdown import of my public obsidian folder resulted in text only. All attachments, including images, were lost, leaving dangling references.
I also tried converting relative links to absolute links in Obsidian before the import, but that didn’t help.
Offline-mode, not offline-first
Craft’s data still lives on its servers. Leaving any privacy concerns out the window, I have more usability concerns. In the hour and a half I spent writing this article and playing around with Craft, I found that much of Craft’s reliability is tied to the internet.
- Searching only partially works.
- Craft has no transparency on what is and isn’t synced
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Calendar events do not sync offline even though calendars themselves work entirely offline.
There is no easy way to show this, but you can try it yourself. Add an event while online and see it appear in Craft. Turn on flight mode, add another event and refresh Craft. The new calendar event has not been updated.
Am I just the wrong audience?
I think so.
Craft is an excellent document-making tool, one where you’d expect documents to live on their own, present them in the finest visual dressings, surprise your audience or one where you’d write by just turning on focus mode, forgetting everything else.
For simple, narrow use cases like those, Craft shines brighter than my head. For anything more complex, a combination of another tool like Obsidian / Logseq / Capacities / Roam Research / AnyType / Tana for all the interlinking and Craft for the exquisite presentation feels best.