Recommendation: Craft
I'm always looking for tools to help me organize my writing as a pastor, amateur sports journalist, and game designer.
I've used a variety of note apps on Mac and iOS over the years, like Notes, Bear, Evernote, VoodooPad, and more. The key is to have a cross-platform piece of software that synchronizes the notes, allowing me to edit and write wherever I am and whenever inspiration strikes. As a bonus, I prefer functionality to export documents to HTML or as a PDF and stash images and crucial links. Oh, and I love Markdown.
Bear.app has been my go to – it was pretty, pleasant to work with, and functional. However, I did get weary of using hashtags to mark documents for organization, as I kind of prefer a clean output option rather than having to delete the hashtags when emailing them to a colleague or copy-pasting them into an online editor. It's exporting functions were missing a few features too.
Enter Craft, a quickly maturing note/writing/production app that has swept me off my feet. I transitioned from Bear and now use it exclusively, except for some occasional quick notes in the basic Notes.app.
At its core, Craft is a little different. Yes, it can be used to type up documents of all kinds, but formatting is a key feature from the get go. Select an entire paragraph, and you can turn it into a quote, bold it, or whatever with various Markdown options. Sort articles into folders based around themes or projects.
Where Craft really rocks is its output options. Turning a Craft story into a DOC or PDF is simple, but even cooler is to create a private link that makes your sermon or game idea into a simple webpage for viewing. Even cooler than that is to write a rich text note to your congregation, for instance, with images and literally copy paste it into your email app to send out. It's gorgeous.
They’ve just added team options and various collaboration features.
An online version of this app is on the way too.
It’s great.
Here are some examples:
