Well I thought the day would never come, I loved Obsidian, I used Apple Notes but Obsidian was my day to day my knowledge base, and I did not think I might move away, after all, I had invested a lot of effort and time in Obsidian.

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But I sat daown to do a cold hard look at what I needed, and on what hardware. I have moved all my efforts to Apple, all of it, phone and Machine, plus I was using iCloud a lot, if fact, I have very little left on Google Drive.

In the end I came to my knowledge base, I had planned Obsidian as my knowledge base, it was good at what it did, but!, some things just bothered me, I was learning html again, and Markdown, and for what I needed, I think i have it well and trudly tied down.

But getting info out of Obsidian ready to use in making a paper or report, meant extra work, Apple notes is easy, both saving almost anything I see hear or do, Obsidian needed work to get anything into the system unless it was text based, and to a large extent, thats just what I needed, but little things were bothering me, and I found myself using Apple Notes and smart folders a lot.

Smart folders work as hash tags should, a file I have made with a single hash tag, can be linked to any number of smart folders. and its so easy to link other hash tags if I think they are relevant.

No coding YouTube video links to make then work, or fit the screen, The Apple App just sends a link to Apple notes, even alllowing me to either use an existing folder, or make a new one, and its not a full screen link its a little link so I can add notes or comments and not be drwoed out by a large YouTube Screen, it works just as well in Vimeo, my now preferred Video platform, no adverts,

OK Ihave a lot in Obsidian, so my next thought was, ok how do I manage this, can I import folders, and in my case sub folders into Apple Notes, again so simple just use the import function as the obsidian files are just mostly text, so finder shows all my files, I navigate to the Obsidian folder, choose the right folder and away it goes, 39 files now inported into notes, stored in a imported Notes folder awaiting my intervention to clean up the notes and with leave as a standard folder, or make a Smart Folder and asign hashtags to the Smart Folder.

One small problem, the import is what Notes thinks the plain text should look like, but oh joy, I can format as wysiwyg, a little wotk on my part, but happy to do this, mostly to clean up the text, add or delete to make it upto date.

So apple now has a more sensible Knowledge base to use, and I suppose this is my main goal, spreading my huge knowledge base across different systems, programs and apple and none apple devices was bothering me, I now feel as though I have got it sorted.

I will still keep Obsidian, I still have a few things I want to import over the Notes, will miss Obsidian, the graph view is seriously good, showing all links, maybe Apple will add this, its not essential but so cool to view.

Search was always very good, but Apple notes is catching up and spotlight will find most things I am looking for.

So Apple Notes is now my lead Knowledge base, anything done is spread to all my Apple devises, my iPhone and my Mac, I use both constantly and when I travel its all iPhone and as I have just upgraded to an iPhone 15, its blazingly good. Oh and I use a clever folding keyboard that links so well to my iPhone, making small notes is brill.

Moving to Notes has also prompted me to take a look at my general writing and where I store it, a lot of my construction writing and my lecture slides are in different places, not any more all my construction notes and information is now in one place under subject, so Brickwork, for instand has all my lecture slides on the subject in one folder together with my papers and general info. This, I think , makes my research so much more efficient.

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