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I love me some Obsidian, but one of Obsidian’s weak spots has always been it’s Shortcuts support (or lack thereof).
That’s where Actions for Obsidian comes in.
Actions for Obsidian serves as the bridge between Obsidian and Shortcuts on the Mac, resulting in almost native support for Shortcuts actions that allow you to do some pretty neat things with the text you send to Obsidian.
To call Actions for Obsidian an app is a bit of a stretch. It’s a macOS utility that serves as a graphic interface for adding over 30 additional actions to Shortcuts that Obsidian doesn’t support out of the box. It also includes a tutorial for setting up Obsidian to take advantage of them, and gives you a link to an Actions & Workflow Library where you can download some pre-made example Shortcuts workflows to download and use instantly.
When you first launch the “app” you get a window with three options: 1) link your Obsidian vault, 2) open the Shortcuts app to use the actions, and 3) visit the Actions & Workflow Library to download pre-made workflows.
In order to use the new actions, the first thing to need to do is to link Actions for Obsidian with your Obsidian vault.
Click the blue button, and the app walks you through a short wizard that helps you set everything up and make sure it’s all connected.
Once you link your vault, the next step is to go into Obsidian itself and enable a specific plugin that allows Obsidian to receive and act on the requests that will be sent to it from the Shortcuts actions. If you’ve not used community plugins before, it will show you exactly how to enable them first.
Once community plugins are enabled, Actions for Obsidian walks you through installing and enabling the Actions URI plugin needed for the Shortcuts actions to work.
Once everything is configured, Actions for Obsidian will perform a test to see if instructions can be sent to Obsidian (and whether it can also send information back using callback URLs). Click the blue Ask Obsidian to call back button and you should see a confirmation prompt if everything is working correctly.
Once everything is good to go, you can start to use the additional actions by creating and editing shortcuts from inside the Shortcuts app. You can find the additional actions by looking for Actions for Obsidian under the Apps section.
The actions are split into five sections:
Some examples of things you can do with these additional actions are creating your Daily Note using a shortcut to help start your day, adding events to an appointments section of your Daily Note from your calendar, and even getting results from a Dataview table (another very powerful third-party plugin that can query your entire vault and return results in the form of a table).
While this does add a nearly-native level of Shortcuts support to Obsidian, there are some limitations. For example, the additional actions currently only work on macOS. The developer is working on adding support for iOS, but it’s not surprising that there are some additional technical hurdles to be overcome there with iOS sandboxing. So right now you can build Shortcuts and fire them on iOS, but the extra actions will break the moment they need to communicate with your Obsidian vault.
Regardless, I’m thrilled this app exists and find it fascinating that a cross-platform Electron app like Obsidian can offer such extensive support for Shortcuts — with a little help from a utility like Actions for Obsidian.
The distribution model is interesting too, as Actions for Obsidian is free to download on the Mac App Store with an in-app purchase. There are three different price tiers to choose from based on how helpful you find the app, starting at $9 USD and going up to $15 USD.
I think this is a really interesting business model for a really interesting app. I hope it’s successful, and I hope to see others create extendable Shortcuts like this for other popular apps. I know Obsidian is well-suited for this because of the third-party plugin architecture, but I think power users of apps like Notion or Craft would absolutely be willing to pay to have a little more automation power at their fingertips too.
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👋🏼 Hi, I’m Mike Schmitz, and I’m an independent creator.
Like Josh, Matt, and Jeff did previously, today I’m going to share a handful of my favorite productivity apps that are essential for how I work.
Of course, an article about my must-have apps is going to start with Obsidian. 😂
My entire life is in Obsidian. I use it for digital journaling, storing all my notes and ideas, all of my writing projects, even Bible study.
What makes Obsidian so powerful is the plugins. You can basically design your own app with the features that you want. For example, I wrote previously about how I used community plugins to add the essential features I missed from Ulysses into Obsidian, giving me the best of both worlds.
One of the best things about Obsidian is that it sits on top of local Markdown files. So if Obsidian ever disappears (doesn’t seem likely in the near future with the release of 1.0 and the hiring of a new CEO), I can take my Markdown-formatted text files anywhere else.
This is easily my most used (and most loved) productivity app.
Mind mapping is underrated. I use it all the time for brainstorming, thinking through things, breaking down complex projects, and more. I even take notes on the books that I read in mind map format.
And if you’re going to create mind maps, MindNode is the app to use.
It has the best user interface of any mind map app available, and gives you a ton of power while still being incredibly easy to use.
If you are looking for a visual thinking tool for macOS or iOS, you need to check out MindNode.
Keynote is a deceptively powerful app that can do WAY more than just create great presentations.
The auto-align feature makes it a great canvas for making quick designs. Yes, they can be exported as images, but I frequently just use CleanShot X to grab a screenshot and add a quick background before sharing.
It’s also great for making quick animations with the Magic Move transition. Create a couple of slides, start a presentation, and use screen capturing software like ScreenFlow to record the animation as a video.
Don’t write it off just because it’s free and comes with your Mac! In my humble opinion, this is easily the best app Apple has ever made.
I don’t use my iPad mini a lot. But when I do, I’m likely using GoodNotes.
GoodNotes is the app to use if you’re going to do anything with handwritten text on the iPad. It’s also a great tool for sketching or diagramming, and the ability to add PDF templates opens up a host of other uses for this powerful app (like The Focus Course Digital Planner).
GoodNotes is the place that I create anything with an Apple Pencil. I’ve tried other more “professional” apps like Procreate, but GoodNotes is the perfect sweet spot between ease of use and powerful tools. I started sketchnoting in GoodNotes several years ago, and it’s only gotten easier and more fun.
If you do any kind of sketching or diagramming, this is an essential app.
I wrote recently about my experiments in using ChatGPT for productivity and creativity, but my preferred way to access ChatGPT is through a macOS app called MacGPT.
On the tin, MacGPT is a menu bar app that allows you to quickly access ChatGTP, and the quickest way to access the ChatGPT website for using GPT-4 without a GPT-4 API key. But it also has a couple of other modes (which do require an API key) for accessing ChatGPT via a spotlight-style global textfield or even inline in any text editor.
If you’re a heavy ChatGPT user who uses your Mac a lot, check out MacGPT.
The apps listed above are critical for my productivity and creativity workflows. If you took these away, my job gets a lot harder.
But there are a bunch of other apps and utilities that I rely on for my day-to-day work. Here are some of the honorable mentions for apps that are important to me, but not quite essential.
Matt Birchler has convinced me to use Cron as my calendar app. It’s Google-only, but I’ve had countless issues with iCloud calendars, so I’m happy to leave those behind.
The keyboard shortcuts in Cron are top notch. You could probably do everything in Cron without ever taking your hands off the keyboard. But what I really like about it is the built-in scheduling system. Just set some availability on your calendar and Cron gives you a sharable link that people can use to book time on your calendar. It doesn’t have all the features of Calendly, but it’s so easy to use that I find myself using this instead most of the time.
Best of all, it’s completely free. And since the makers of Notion are also behind this app, I’m not worried about this one disappearing any time soon.
Like Matt, I also use CleanShot X all day, every day. It’s a brilliant app.
In addition to letting you make quick edits and share your screenshots to the cloud (so you can share link instead of a file), CleanShot X also makes it easy to capture animated gifs and scrolling screenshots.
But the feature I find myself using the most is the ability to add colorful backgrounds to your screenshots. Built-in macOS screenshots are boring, and CleanShot X makes them a lot more interesting.
At the day job, I had a lot of meetings. And Camo Studio was essential for whenever I wasn’t in my home office to attend them.
For example, I share an office with someone at a coworking space so I can get out of the house once in awhile. I have an external monitor there and can use Continuity Camera, but it’s still fairly limited in my ability to touch up my on-screen appearance. But Camo Studio now works with any of your camera sources, so I can customize the video from my Continuity Camera and get it look almost as good as my setup at home.
If you want good-looking video but don’t want to spend a ton on a dedicated webcam or camera, check out Camo Studio.
For a long time, I was a die-hard Alfred user. But Raycast has become my launcher of choice because of the library of extensions you can use to easily extend the capabilities of the app.
You can get extensions that allow you to add things directly to Obsidian, view events on your calendar in Fantastical, add todos to your task manager in Things, and a lot more. Just search the Raycast Store and find the one you want to use from within the app itself and click Install.
I also like what Raycast is doing with the built-in AI in the Pro plan. And I’ll be really intrigued when they add the promised support for the GPT-4 model.
We’ve written about this a ton before, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Drafts. I use Drafts for quick capture on my iPhone and Apple Watch all the time for small bits of information or as the starting place for content pieces. It’s especially useful when I want to capture an idea while out for a run.
Where I really rely on Drafts though is on the Mac. That’s where I go through everything I’ve captured and either delete things I don’t need or move them to their permanent home (likely Obsidian). Having access to all my Drafts on my Mac (and the actions I use to process them) makes combing through my Drafts inbox a breeze.
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Step 2: Upgrade → Build a productivity system that plays to your strengths (even if you find “systems” annoying).
Step 3: Nurture → Make your system stick. Create a flywheel that keeps you focused on what matters most day after day.
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I’ve been spending time playing with infinite canvas apps lately, and there are a lot of great options available. In this article, we’ll compare and contrast the features of each of these apps to help you choose the one that best fits your needs.
An infinite canvas app is a digital board that gives you an unlimited virtual workspace to create and organize your ideas, sketches, notes, and other types of content. Think of it like a virtual whiteboard, but with no predefined pages or fixed dimensions so you never run out of space (hence the term ‘infinite canvas’).
Infinite canvas apps are particularly useful for creative professionals, artists, designers, and educators who need to brainstorm, sketch, or plan their projects in a flexible and unrestricted way. They can also be beneficial for personal use, such as for note-taking, mind mapping, or laying out the different parts of a large project.
The goal of an infinite canvas app is to provide you with the space and tools to think more creatively about things. I’ve spent a bit of time with three of the more popular ones as of late:
What surprised me is that these three different apps really have three very different scenarios where they shine. Here’s how they stack up and where they really shine.
Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard platform designed to allow teams to work together on brainstorming, planning, and visualizing ideas. It is primarily focused on visual collaboration, allowing teams to create diagrams, mind maps, flowcharts, and other visual representations of information.
When you create a board in Miro, you have the option of using a pre-made template to help get you started. There are templates for meetings, kanban workflows, flow charts, product roadmaps, presentations, and much more. If you can think of a business use case for collaboration (i.e. a SWOT analysis or department-level OKR tracking), there is probably a pre-made template you can use.
Because Miro is first and foremost a web app, it offers integrations with lots of other popular online productivity tools. For example, you can embed cards for tasks from apps like Asana and ClickUp, embed design images to get feedback from apps like Figma and Sketch, and collaborate from other communication tools like Slack and Zoom.
What I like about Miro is that it’s really easy to pick up and use. The templates make it easy to get started, and it’s easy to collaborate with others regardless of the technology they decide to use.
If you’re looking for something strictly based on how easy it will be to collaborate with others, Miro is a solid choice. You can access it from just about anywhere, and the integrations with other popular productivity tools make it an ideal choice if you need to work with others (especially in a corporate setting).
Freeform is an infinite canvas app from Apple designed for creative brainstorming and collaboration. It comes pre-installed on current versions of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, giving you built-in creative tools on any Apple device.
With Freeform, you can create multimedia boards on top of your infinite canvas that includes photos, video, audio, documents, PDFs, links to websites and map location links, sticky notes, shapes, diagrams, and more. You can use drag-and-drop from Files and Finder and built-in alignment guides help you snap objects into their proper place.
But the big emphasis in Freeform is on collaboration, with the ability to have up to 100 collaborators on each board. You can drag a board from Freeform into a Messages thread, and all members of that thread will instantly be invited. FaceTime is also built into the app so that you can connect in real time as you collaborate in the app.
What I like about Freeform is the ability to sketch and use the Apple Pencil when using it on my iPad. I still like GoodNotes better for sketching, but using Freeform on an iPad opens up a lot more creative possibilities. Unfortunately, it’s hard to use handwriting like this on your Mac, forcing you to use it more like a standard collaborative whiteboard app.
If you’re an Apple Notes user who has ever wished you could just drag things around inside the Notes app, you’ll love Freeform. It’s still a little rough around the edges, but it’s a pretty impressive thinking tool that offers simple collaboration with others — as long as they are fellow Apple nerds.
Canvas is a new feature added to Obsidian that gives you the ability to create an infinite canvas app inside your Obsidian vault. It’s available as a Core Plugin inside the app and is available on both desktop and mobile (but must be enabled to be used).
Once enabled, creating a Canvas allows you to lay out your notes and ideas so you can organize them visually. You can embed your notes alongside text blocks, images, PDFs, videos, audio, and even fully interactive web pages. Canvas views can be embedded in other notes, and even inside another Canvas.
While Canvas files in Obsidian use a different file format from the standard Markdown formatting the rest of the app is built on, it’s still designed with interoperability in mind. By using an open-source JSON format for Canvas files, apps, scripts, and plugins can enhance your Canvas by adding or modifying the cards and connections it contains.
What I like about Canvas is that I don’t have to leave Obsidian. It reminds me a lot of the corkboard feature Scrivener had back in the day, where writers could lay out all the parts or sections of their writing project and move them around visually on screen. There’s something powerful about simply rearranging your ideas visually that can cause things to click.
If you are all in on Obsidian, Canvas is a great tool for helping you make sense of your notes and ideas. The killer feature is the ability to create boards inside your Obsidian vault and make connections between things. But, it doesn’t allow you to collaborate with others, and if you don’t keep everything in Obsidian then it is pretty feature-limited compared to other infinite canvas apps.
If you need to collaborate with others in a corporate environment (or don’t have any influence over the devices your collaborators will use), check out Miro. It offers a free tier, and the large template library makes it easy to get started.
If you are all-in on the Apple ecosystem and feel comfortable using Apple Notes, check our Freeform. The tools will feel familiar, and your boards will sync across all your Apple devices.
If you are a heavy Obsidian user (like me) and use it for note-taking AND writing, check out Canvas. There’s a lot of insight to be had from arranging the contents of your Obsidian notes visually, especially when brainstorming or planning larger personal creative projects.
We spend an inordinate amount of time sorting through hundreds of apps to find the very best. Our team here at The Sweet Setup put together a short list of our must-have, most-used apps for writing, note-taking, and thinking.
RSS has been an important part of information workflows for many years, but read-it-later apps (and the RSS services many of them are based on) desperately need some inspiration and innovation.
Enter Readwise Reader, an app that attempts to combine your RSS, newsletters, web highlights, and more into a single location.
I’ve been using this Reader service for the last couple of months, and it’s completely revitalized my read-it-later reading workflow.
Readwise has been around as a service to help you get the most out of what you read for a long time. It allows you to sync your highlights from your Kindle device or services like Instapaper or Pocket and then review them periodically. You can even share your highlights, and you’ve probably seen images of Readwise quotes circulating social media before without maybe realizing where they came from:
Recently, Readwise has opened up a public beta of a new app named Reader that aims to handle all of your read-it-later needs. You can subscribe to feeds of your favorite websites via RSS, collect your favorite newsletters, save highlights from web articles, and more. Reader pulls it all into one place so you don’t need to juggle a dozen other reading apps.
All of the standard features you’d expect in your RSS aggregator of choice are here: you can collect and organize feeds, take notes on the articles and posts you’ve read, and archive things that you’ve looked at already. But Reader aims to bring your reading material from multiple places under one roof, so you can also use it to collect things like Tweets, web articles, ePubs, PDFs, and more.
Reader even gives you a special email address you can use to forward things to. Over the past several years of using Feedbin, I’ve used this feature to collect all of the email newsletters that I want to read regularly into my RSS app (a great feature if you’re trying to spend less time in your email as it helps separate the good stuff from the rest of the random junk that tends to show up in your email inbox). But the ability to highlight things in these newsletters and have that automatically get stored in Readwise means I can collect quotes and text snippets from more than just ebooks and web articles.
On iOS, Reader not only gives you a clean user interface for both your Library (which includes an inbox, later, and archive) and your Feed (a list of things that are either seen or unseen), but also makes it easy to add things to either using the iOS Share extension.
There’s also a bunch of new stuff in here that IMHO makes Reader better than just about every other RSS or read-it-later service out there.
For example, you can also save YouTube videos to Reader. But in addition to simply viewing the videos that you’ve saved at your convenience, Reader also gives you a live transcription that appears below the currently playing video and highlights the text as the video plays:
This makes following along with the video even easier and allows you to highlight text from the video to save for later.
On mobile, you can also listen to articles and have Readwise read the entire text to you. Just tap the Listen button in the upper-right, and a play bar opens at the bottom of the article that allows you to control the speed of the playback and even select from a couple of different text-to-speech voices.
Reader also has a Ghostreader feature, which is an AI-based tool that you can use to help create notes from the things that you read. You can choose a prompt from categories like Summarize the document or Ask the document a question and the output gets added to the article as a note.
You can also enable a public link to anything in your Reader library which makes it easy to share things with others. A public link not only allows anyone to view the article in Readwise, but they can also see your highlights, notes, and tags as well.
The Readwise service and the Reader app go together like peanut butter and jelly. Either one is fine on their own, but they are much better together. It’s hard to overstate how cool it is to have all of your highlights synced to Readwise automatically. I have a few paid newsletters I’ve subscribed to, and I love being able to see my highlights from those newsletters show up in my Readwise summaries and reviews alongside notes from books, YouTube videos, and more.
The Reader app itself feels like the breath of fresh air that RSS desperately needs. It’s also very reasonably priced, as when the beta is over the app is to be included with the current Readwise service at no additional cost. Historically, the full Readwise service has been $7.99 USD per month. While that hasn’t been enough for me to justify paying for the service previously, the addition of Reader makes the decision to switch a no-brainer for me.
For context, I’ve been paying $5 USD per month for FeedBin for a very long time. And while I’ve been happy with the service, Reader gives me everything FeedBin does and adds a bunch of new features on top of it. Plus I get access to the traditional Readwise service, for a couple of bucks more a month.
If you rely on RSS for any part of your read-it-later workflow, you should definitely check out Readwise Reader.
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A while back, I reviewed the reMarkable e-ink tablet. There’s a lot to like about the reMarkable tablet: it’s thin and light, has incredible battery life, and offers a great writing experience for a digital tablet. But the software was lacking, and the more I used it, the more I found myself bumping up against the limitations of the device in frustrating ways.
One of the most annoying was that I couldn’t use my own PDF templates. When David Sparks and I put together the NeuYear Focused calendar for 2023, I worked with Jesse at NeuYear to create a PDF template for planning your day with the intention of using it on my reMarkable to plan my day. I was expecting that I would be able to swipe to create additional pages with the same PDF template applied, but it didn’t work. With the reMarkable, you can upload PDFs, but can’t use a single page as a custom template for a notebook.
Around the same time, a friend of mine was telling me about another e-ink device he was considering that ran the full Android operating system. Which I completely dismissed, until he sent me a screenshot of the device running Obsidian.
Now the wheels were turning. Could I possibly find an e-ink device that would fill the role of the reMarkable, provide a decent writing experience, and could be used for digital journaling in Obsidian?
I had to see for myself. So I ordered the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra, and have been using it for the last couple of weeks as my “end-of-day device.”
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It’s a little tricky figuring out what to actually call this device: the manufacturer is Boox, the device name is the Tab Ultra, but almost every instance online refers to it as the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra (so that’s what I’ll use).
The best way to describe the device is a low-powered 10.3″ iPad with an e-ink screen that is designed for writing with a stylus. It runs Android 11 and has the Google Play store installed, but also has several built-in custom apps like a web browser, RSS reader, library, and notes.
At $600, it’s not cheap (though it does include a stylus that I personally like better than the Apple Pencil). Honestly, I’ve spent a lot more than that on Apple devices I didn’t “need” over the years, and I was intrigued by the idea of an e-ink tablet that I could use for my evening journaling and shutdown routine.
If you like the idea of the reMarkable but wish it could do a little bit more, then Onyx Boox Tab Ultra may be just what you’re looking for.
The Notes app is the one I was particularly interested in, and I was happy to see that not only did it support templates, but there were also quite a few impressive features built-in. For example, there are lots of different pen and brush tools to choose from, and you can save presets at the top of the interface so you can easily switch back and forth between them. You can also add layers and choose from a couple of different canvas sizes. You can even add links to web pages and audio recordings to your notes, and can select text to copy and export via OCR (much better than the email-only feature in the reMarkable).
Overall, the Notes app is much better than I expected. It’s not quite GoodNotes, but it’s a big step up from the software on the reMarkable. The e-ink screen isn’t responsive enough to do a lot of fancy drawing (you won’t be pinch-to-zooming like you would on an iPad), but it is an excellent note-taking tool.
The “killer feature” of this device though is the fact that you can install third-party apps. There are a couple that I use regularly, including my beloved Obsidian and the new Readwise Reader app.
This is where things start to really get interesting.
The dream I had when using this device was that I would be able to install and use Obsidian on it as part of my end-of-day journaling routine. And honestly, I wasn’t optimistic that it would work. My Obsidian vault has over 35,000 files in it, and my iPhone and iPad frequently had trouble loading a vault of that size.
But I am happy to report that it works just fine, with a couple of tweaks:
To be clear, I’m not using everything in Obsidian here. It’s mobile, so there are missing features (like Canvas) and certain community plugins don’t work well in the mobile version of Obsidian. So I’m primarily using this to complete my digital journaling in Obsidian at the end of the day.
In addition to using the on-screen keyboard, there is a Scribble-like input option in the Boox onscreen keyboard settings. I like to use this to write out my entries by hand using the stylus instead of typing them. This works pretty well, though the formatting gets a little weird if you try to do more than one line at a time.
I also purchased the keyboard case, so in theory, I could grab the Tab Ultra and go to a coffee shop for a writing session if I wanted to. I haven’t done this yet, but the keyboard case is perfectly fine so I imagine I will do this occasionally in the future.
It feels very much like the iPad Keyboard Folio, but I think the keys feel a little bit nicer.
With all the drama on The Bird Site, quite a few of the people I followed for tech news & insights are no longer there. And while I’m kicking the tires on Mastodon, I kind of like not having social media to check in on. I do still want to keep tabs on some of my favorite sites and creators though, so lately I’ve been rebuilding my RSS feed.
There is a built-in RSS Reader on the Onyx Boox, but it’s pretty basic. And with the new Readwise Reader service being available as a public beta, I’ve been using that as the center of my RSS reading workflow.
There are lots of things to love about the Readwise Reader app (I’ll go more in-depth in a future article), but the big one that I love is the dedicated email address that you can use to send email newsletters to your RSS feed. I’ve been doing this for awhile in FeedBin, and it’s great. But the Readwise Reader app has some additional filtering tools that breaks things into categories and offers a nicer reading interface than any other RSS app I tried to use FeedBin with.
The best part: the e-ink display has filters to eliminate all the blue light from the device, making it the perfect tool for doing some catch-up reading at the end of the day before I go to bed. As an added bonus, all of the highlights I make as I’m reading articles and newsletters in Reader automatically sync to my Readwise account as well so they’re easier to find later.
After a couple of weeks, it is a little weird not to be checking in throughout the day on what’s going on. But I also don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything that’s really important, and it’s been a boost to my ability to focus during the workday.
The one thing I wish I had more control over is the font in the Readwise Reader app. All of the fonts are too bold for my taste, but that’s a pretty minor issue that I’ve pretty much gotten used to.
There are a handful of other third-party apps I’ve been using on the device, including:
There are a bunch of other apps I could use on the device that I intentionally leave off (basically everything that connects to work for the day job). These include:
While the Onyx Boox could be used for all of those, I’ve been very careful about what I let onto this device. I like the fact that there are only a couple of things I can do when I pick it up, which helps me follow through on my original intentions and reinforces its role as my end-of-day device.
The reMarkable has gotten a lot of use for note-taking at the day job the last several months, but this has easily slid into that slot for me because it’s much easier to get my notes off of the device and into a usable format.
The Onyx Boox is a bit thicker and heavier than the reMarkable (the reMarkable is 9.7″ x 7.4″ by 0.2″ and weighs 14.1 ounces while the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra is 8.9″ x 7.3″ x 0.26″ and weighs 16.9 ounces), but it’s not really noticeable for me. If you were carrying it around all day on your person you might notice, but it’s sitting on my desk most of the time, and the moments where I have to grab it and bring it with me it doesn’t bother me at all.
The battery life isn’t as good as the reMarkable, but it’s still much better than any iPad I’ve ever used. I use it pretty heavily throughout the day and have to charge it about once a week.
The reMarkable also has a better writing experience out of the box, though I got a Doodroo screen protector that feels a lot like using a mechanical pencil on a sheet of paper. It’s not as pleasant as a fancy fountain pen, but it’s a lot more tactile and provides a pleasant writing experience. In my opinion, it actually feels a little bit nicer than not only the reMarkable but also the iPad with a Paperlike screen protector I’ve been using for sketchnotes for years.
Compared to an iPad, everything on the Onyx Boox just feels a little slower and less fluid. There is no buttery-smooth scrolling, and I didn’t realize how much I’ve come to rely on iCloud until I had to set up a device outside of the Apple ecosystem.
There’s also a handful of apps that are clearly made for smaller screen sizes that look a little bit goofy on the 10.3 inch screen. Using Android apps has really highlighted how much TLC goes into iOS design. I’m so used to downloading apps and having them look great on any device, that the lack of established screen size support seems a little bit weird.
There’s also the obvious limitations of the e-ink screen itself. It can be a little bit jarring navigating apps that assume you’re using a color display and can see the difference in the colors between buttons and windows.
The one thing that I absolutely dislike is the camera bump on the back. When the Onyx Boox isn’t in a case, the camera bump is big enough that the device doesn’t lay flat and wobbles when you write on it. Both the keyboard case and the normal case are both pretty minimal, so in practice it’s quite possible you’d never use the device outside a case, but it feels like a bit of an oversight.
Even with all these limitations though, I absolutely adore this device. It’s everything I was hoping for (even if I couldn’t articulate it) when I first picked up the reMarkable. I’m not expecting the device to perform like an iPad, and expecting any e-ink device to do so isn’t really a fair comparison.
For what it is, the Onyx Boox Tab Ultra is great. Just don’t expect it to be something it isn’t (namely, an iPad).
If you are trying to decide between the Onyx Boox and an iPad, go with the iPad. It’s a much more capable device and can do everything the OnyxBoox does and then some.
But if you have ever been intrigued by the reMarkable, you should give this a look. It’s a very specific type of person who is intrigued by a digital notepad, and the Onyx Boox tab Ultra takes everything that’s great about the reMarkable, makes it better, and adds a whole lot more on top of it.
If you’re sold on the idea of Onyx Boox but the $600 list price is too much, check out the Onyx Boox Note Air 2 Plus. The Tab Ultra is the new flagship device in the Onyx Boox line, but the Note Air 2 Plus is still plenty capable and is actually a bit thinner and lighter (since it doesn’t have the built-in camera for document scanning).
Introducing the new Focus Boosters.
Inside our popular community membership, join us for a the Habit Building challenge (a.k.a. “Booster”). You’ll find out how to make simple changes that will make your daily life better, remove distractions, and create a new simple habit.
Membership Includes: Simple Habits Course, Habit Tracking Templates, Digital Planner, Private Community Slack, 2x Monthly Coaching Calls, and much, much more…
There are a million habit-tracking apps out there. But almost all of them are built on some form of the idea, “Don’t break the chain.”
The basic idea is that when you consistently show and take action, you create a lot of momentum toward creating positive change. And that makes a lot of sense. But when you mess up and break your streak, it can be pretty discouraging.
This is great for helping you keep an established habit going, but it can be frustrating when you fall off the wagon.
If you’ve felt this before and are looking for a habit tracker to help you make positive changes without the guilt, then you need to check out Polar Habits.
Polar Habits is a simple web app that allows you to create habits and build momentum by completing them. The momentum is calculated by adding the number of days you’ve consecutively completed the task or subtracting the number of days you’ve consecutively missed and is displayed visually in a Dashboard.
Over time, your growth compounds and you can see the progress you’re making. And most importantly, that progress is not immediately wiped out because you missed a day. If you have a daily habit that you complete 5 times this week and miss twice, you’ll still be able to see momentum build visually over time.
The app is very simple: You add a habit, give it an optional description, and choose the interval (by default this is daily, but the upcoming Pro plan allows you set custom intervals, like 4 times per week). Then you check the box when you do the task, the app throws some on-screen confetti to celebrate, and your momentum is updated visually.
It’s still early in development, and there are no mobile apps for Polar Habits as of this writing. The website says that they are on the roadmap, but you’d be hard-pressed to notice if you saved the web app to your iPhone Home Screen (which you can do by tapping on the Share icon and then tapping Add to Home Screen).
I know some people will cringe at that, but in my opinion, this is the ideal app for this kind of workaround. It’s not a complicated app, and it doesn’t rely on fancy iOS features. Its beauty is in its simplicity.
It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that other habit trackers do, but that’s the whole point. If you’ve struggled to get a habit tracker to stick, give Polar Habits a look.
Polar Habits is free to use and gives you an unlimited number of habits. There will be a Pro plan with more features according to the website that will cost $8/month or $48/year.
Introducing the new Focus Boosters.
Inside our popular community membership, join us for a the Habit Building challenge (a.k.a. “Booster”). You’ll find out how to make simple changes that will make your daily life better, remove distractions, and create a new simple habit.
Membership Includes: Simple Habits Course, Habit Tracking Templates, Digital Planner, Private Community Slack, 2x Monthly Coaching Calls, and much, much more…
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