This year entailed some changes in my app stack. The biggest change was with note-taking.

I’ve gone from Evernote in the early 2000s to OneNote in the 2010s and hadn’t found something that worked. I moved to Joplin for a while (a very good app) but finally landed with Logseq early this year. I won’t sing too many praises but I really like that it stores each note as a markdown file. This means all my notes are portable and not part of a traditional database. To some, that might not seem important but it really is: don’t you want your data to be in a format you can use even if your notes app is broken? Logseq also creates a mind-map of your notes. It also allows you to create whiteboards and flash-cards but I haven’t found those features too useful.

Recently I’ve moved, after more than a decade, from Pocket to Omnivore to save internet articles I want to read later. The import process was easy and I want to keep moving my stack to open-source even if software like Pocket works just fine. Like the move to Logseq, part of this shift has to do with data sovereignty. It’s important for all of us to confront issues of data ownership.