Creating Deep Links in Apple Notes
I’m in a really weird place with my workflow lately. I capture tasks in OmniFocus and use that as both my digital inbox and task management application. In the past, I used Evernote as my primary reference solution, adding both long-term storage (articles that I found that I know I’ll eventually need to refer to again) and project content (e.g., brainstorming personal goals to understand motivations, incremental targets, capturing status updates). I also used it for meeting notes from 2011-2015 while working for a company that had assigned me a Mac as my work laptop.
When I started working another company in 2015, they only used Windows machines, and since I was in a role that was more prone to HIPAA controls, it was not an option to have Evernote on my work laptop. I started using OneNote for capturing meeting notes and relied on Evernote only from my personal computers for personal content.
Fast forward to fall 2020 and Evernote made some significant changes with their product road map. They changed their pricing structure and relaunched their application essentially rebuilt from the ground up. People panicked about Evernote’s stability as a company. And since Evernote released their new application with basic functionality with plan to add features back in, people were understandably upset about the loss of core features they had come to depend on. In the interest of disclosure, I was a certified Evernote consultant and even I was beginning to question this strategy.
To make matters worse, I had 12,800 notes in Evernote, so there were technical challenges that made me reluctant to leave Evernote as well.
When I accepted a new position in the summer of 2021 with a technology company that views Evernote as a competitor, I lost the ability to use OneNote (we are on Mac laptops and use Google Workspace instead of Microsoft Office there — which is a post for another day) or Evernote. Further compounding these decisions, my somewhat casual plan migrate from the Windows desktop I used at home to an iMac was accelerated when my new employer sent me a dock for my company MacBook Pro and it dawned one me that buying an iMac made little sense since I had a months-old MacBook Pro as my personal laptop.
When I archived off all the reference material that I seldom needed/used, I was left with a couple hundred PDF-based records (e.g., documents from mortgage refinance, credit reports, medical records) that could be stored in as organized a manner on a shared drive on my NAS as in Evernote, and another couple hundred documents (web- or text-based) that I needed more frequently but that could go into Apple Notes.
This reduced my reliance on Evernote to include only active projects where I’m working in notes presently, but which can be archived off when I’m done with the project. It also increased my reliance on Apple Notes, which lacks features, and as Evernote further expands its product feature set (as expected), it just leaves Apple Notes in the dust, of course.
One of the biggest gaps was the ability to add an internal link in an Apple Note to another note. While there is a fairly complicated Shortcut you can create to generate the internal link, it only works in Apple Notes and until this functionality is expanded significantly, will remain a hindrance. For example, if I have reference notes that I want to link to in OmniFocus where I manage the actual tasks for the project, that’s not possible with Apple Notes, whereas it works great with Evernote (though it didn’t when Evernote 10 was initially released).
You can download and install the Shortcut via iCloud here, or the instructions are available in this article.
