Adrian's Blog

So… my 6 year old wanted a website. I thought about it and decided to create him a blog on micro.blog. He has no problem posting all by himself (under my supervision).

Elf on the shelf skin my son made and wanted posted

More thoughts on HEY!

Features I like in no particular order

I do like the screener. But at times it can be annoying. For instance, I sign up for a food delivery service and make an order. They send an e-mail. I clearly want confirmation, but I always have to screen them in. The same is true for online retailers.

I love per contact notifications, but I wish they could be more fine grained. I want notifications from some things, but not every notification. For instance, I would like receipts from things I buy, but not “special offers” from the same domain.

I like Hey’s widget way more than spark or Apple mail for instance. Maybe this is per your own taste, but it’s what I think.

I like set aside, it’s probably my most used feature. I know it’s easily replicated in a standard client, but the way it’s built in makes a difference.

Focus and reply I rarely use. Outside of work, I just don’t reply to that many emails.

I also don’t really use the notes attached to e-mail like I thought I would.

Search hasn’t been an issue of late, but it’s clearly not yet as good as gmail or Fastmail. Like I said, it hasn’t been an issue lately, but I do worry about it.

They app. I really like the app, but do sometimes get frustrated I can’t easily get mail into Devonthink or use a new client.

Let me know what questions you have!

Hey!

Ok, I wanted to (and did) love using Hey. But there are and were issues.

The biggest issue for me is probably search. Search is currently awful in Hey. You can search for a keyword you know is in an email and it sometimes simply won’t find the email. Search doesn’t find file names in attachments. I don’t understand why it’s so bad. If search were rock solid, I may still be using Hey.

I liked the concept Hey uses of unimportant email going to the paper trail and the feed, however, too many companies still send email from the same email address. I end up getting tons of email to the Imbox still because I don’t want to miss the emails I do want to see still. With other services I use Sanebox, so a lot of filtering is taken care of for me.

FastMail

I really do love FastMail. There mobile app is far superior to Gmail’s mobile app. Search if FastMail is great, it even searches inside documents now, just like gmail. The issue is that I still use Google for a lot of things. I didn’t switch to Hey for privacy concerns. I share a lot of documents with my spouse within Google Drive. It just didn’t make sense to stick with FastMail based on all the integrations I use from Google Workspace.

Will I go back?

Honestly, PROBABLY!

What I mean is I love to experiment with apps and services and something will probably push me back, and I’ll start the flip flop cycle, but these are my thoughts today.

My hey email then Fastmail excursion are over. Loved a lot of hey, but search is just awful. Fastmail is also great, but the integrations on google workspace are too good. Keeping an eye on both though. I flip flop a lot lol

My son wants to be a YouTuber (6). I want to start working on my LumaFusion skills. The result… a work in progress for both of us lol

youtu.be/hUsMPtN9t…

It finally arrived

Finished reading “Hail Mary” by Andy Weir. Excellent sci-fi. Highly recommend! 📚

Went back to gmail for reasons , happy so far. Miss some features of Hey, but freedom of using any app is nice. Also search is so much better.

Evil bowl or happy bowl?

This is amazing

@SlexAxton: I feel like we didn’t focus enough on the fact that someone in the Trump campaign meant to schedule the “four seasons hotel” but definitely accidentally scheduled this “four seasons landscaping” store and they had to follow through with it. Veep was not this good. twitter.com/SlexAxton…

Notion backlinks (while cool) are not as good as Backlinks in Roamresearch.

I currently pay for Dropbox. Basically for no reason. Think I’m going to cancel my Dropbox paid account to support paying for Roam.

I use a lot of apps because I like different features of all of them.

Roamresearch The newest app I use. I currently use this app for meeting notes at work. I also use it as a scratch pad / minimal todo list throughout the day rather than paper. If I generate longer term todos at the end of the day I will transfer to my task manager (Things 3). So far I like it for this purpose.

Notion My main use case is for notes I need to study. I have a job where I have to go to training every 5 weeks. I have a written exam during this training week. I have been using Notion to keep my notes and use the toggle feature to ask myself questions. I want to replace Evernote, but it doesn’t have OCR of documents, and I can’t forward an email to it yet.

Evernote I dump documents and emails here. That is my main use case now. I also will write some general notes, but not many.

Google Drive I need to share documents with my wife, so before dumping in Evernote, I put a copy in google drive.

I know this is kind of crazy, but it works for me.

Until the next shiny app comes along…

When you can’t choose a task manager…

Maybe air tag support will be built in to the new Apple TV remote?

My eternal struggle. Things 3 is such a joy to use. But a few features are missing, and no web app.

OmniFocus has all the missing features and a (basic, but it’s something) web app. Just not as fun to use as Things.

Curious what the future holds for Things 3…or 4 ?!

ATP

My new ATP.FM MUG

The behind the scenes videos for Evernote started more than a year ago. This is insane…

I sort of think of Evernote differently than I used to.

As far as a strict note taker, I’m not sure I have a huge need for that these days.

I do have small notes I need to occasionally take, and any app is suited to this task.

The issue for me is I try to find the best “everything bucket” that also takes notes.

I bounce around among most of the top ones.

Evernote: been a user since 2008. Started becoming weary a couple of years ago. Not sure I like the direction they are going. And wherever they are going, it’s taking FOREVER

Keep It: Great iOS citizen, but, for me at least, always had slow sync issues. Maybe because it only allows iCloud sync?

DEVONthink: Amazing Mac app, but very heavy duty. Search is probably the best of any app, but again, it can be so heavy. The iOS app is ok…. Supposedly they are working on an update to improve the note taking experience, but they are a small company and move kind of slow. I found iCloud sync to be slow so switched to Dropbox. It seems to be much faster, but still not as fast as EN (IMHO). I really like the cloud first nature of EN. DT and DTTG do both sync, but they are very much not cloud first or cloud native products if that makes sense.

I know open podcasts etc…. but I really love the JRE. I may move the family to Spotify this fall 🤯

Made a freezer inventory in @notionhq as you do….

Open spaces at the park

My Todoist year in review. I struggle with task managers still. Been off of work for 10 days and using mostly Things 3, but I go back to work tomorrow, which means a PC… enter todoist. These year in reviews are pretty cool…. though not sure if truly useful or not?

todoist.com/review/20…

Been playig around with Notion a lot. I imported my entire EN. As a note taking app, I would say it’s superior to EN. But my biggest use these days for EN is for document storage. For that use case, I would say Notion is not as good. Thoughts?

I for now have settled on google drive being the central everything bucket where I share documents with my wife.

The search is so good (surprise, surprise) and it’s so easy to share a huge folder of documents with my wife.

I know people aren’t crazy about the privacy implications but that isn’t too much of a concern for me.

I need to write a blog post or do a short podcast on this.