RIP Evernote, onto Apple Notes

I was an Evernote evangelist for 15 years and I was a paying user for 10 years. Evernote was ahead of it’s time. It was a notes app, freeform database, and web archive tool. It even had optical character recognition 15 years before any other mainstream app, meaning you could search the text within an attached image.

I used Evernote to archive web pages, recipes, birthday gifts, receipts, random songs on the radio—before cell coverage and Shazam were reliable. Even some goofy article my high school gym teacher wrote for the Manchester Hippo made it into my Evernote file.

The app was also system agnostic. It worked on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and the web. The Evernote clipper plugin even worked on Linux. I was an Android user for my first 6 years of being a smartphone user. I used Ubuntu Linux for over 5 years as my daily driver operating system at work. Being system agnostic was something appealing to me—and still is.

When I got my first job after college, I decided to upgrade to the paid version of Evernote, which was roughly $30/year at the time. The yearly rate slowly increased, but somehow I managed to remain grandfathered-in to a modest pricing plan. Evernote got reorganized multiple times, and more recently got bought out by Bending Spoons, a European conglomerate. The kicker is that they were going to force me onto a $130/year plan. Forget it.

I’ve been slowly drinking more and more of the Apple koolaid. Truth be told, I’ve been using Macintoshes since I was 2 years old. When I was 6, in 1999, my parents got me one of the original G3 iMacs. Mine was green ☺️ That computer also will go down in history as one of the best pieces of industrial design ever.

Enter Apple Notes. It was one of the first iOS apps in 2008, but it was quite crude, despite the kitschy skeuomorphism façade. The font was MarkerFelt if I remember correctly and the background looked like a yellow legal pad. I never really considered it a serious note taking app until more recently.

Fortunately over the years Apple has added nearly all of my beloved features of Evernote. Optical character recognition, tags for notes, folders, device syncing (only among Apple devices), a web app, etc. I’ll add that the tagging feature in Apple Notes is better than Evernote: anywhere within the note, you can just use # symbols just like a tweet. Apple Notes also works much faster than Evernote, which was starting to get pretty slow in the new versions. Only notable omission is that Apple Notes does not have a web page clipping feature. This was nice in Evernote, because often webpages change or eventually get removed. Oh well. That feature wasn’t worth $130 for me.

I used this fantastic utility on GitHub called evernote-backup to archive all my notes in Evernote, which really are just rows in a SQLite database. The Evernote archive files can be imported directly into Apple Notes. After that I was off to the races. Vivat Apple Notes.

New Hampshire urban village design

When you walk down any street in the Netherlands you never feel claustrophobic, yet the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in the western world—not including micro-states. Zoom in even more, Amsterdam is one of the most prominent cities in Europe, yet the urban experience when you walk around doesn’t feel anymore overwhelming than that of Portsmouth, NH. The streets are lined with narrow brick four-story buildings with cheese shops at ground level and apartments above. You can’t say the same thing about other cities: London, Paris, Los Angeles, and especially not New York.

Conversely, another datapoint I will preface this article with is that the State of New Jersey—by far the most densely populated American state—is only slightly less densely populated than the Netherlands. Yet when you drive around the average town in New Jersey, you are overwhelmed with traffic, rude drivers, strip malls, jug handles, Jersey barriers (they are called walls in NJ), and parking lots as far as the eye can see. What went wrong?

The answer is bad design and the abandonment of traditional development principles all reinforced by ridiculous land-use codes. The turning point in the United States was when Euclidian zoning (i.e.: separated residential, commercial, and industrial zones) was ruled constitutional in 1926 by the Supreme Court case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. The situation was exacerbated after WWII with massive population growth and massive socialized highway projects.

As an aside, ironically, the namesake of Euclidian zoning is not Euclidian geometry, but rather a village in Ohio. Euclidian geometry is the study of flat surfaces, lines, and angles.

The US and Canada have been stuck with Euclidian zoning for the past 100 years. Everywhere else in the world, zoning allows for some level of mixed-use development, but your mileage may vary.

Zoning is largely done at the national-level in many European countries. It’s very rigid, but it does allow for better mixed use and missing middle development than that of North America. Japan has a mix of national and local control for zoning and is by far the best zoning model in the civilized world in my opinion. Their system demonstrates how standardized zoning can actually increase freedom, affordability, and development options, rather than restrict them.

There are 12 different zone types in Japan and they are standard throughout the country. In New Hampshire, by comparison, each town decides their own respective Byzantine zone types and it’s a mess. Japan also has a great deal of local control in the sense that local authorities get to decide where to apply each of the 12 zone types. Where Japan gets even more compelling from a libertarian perspective is that, for the most part, each level higher in zone type allows for land use permitted in any of the previous zone categories.

For example, industrial zones have the highest zoning level and are the most permissive zones. Not only can you build a factory in an industrial zone, but you can also build mixed-use residential-businesses and detached single family homes. The lowest category of zoning is light residential. Interestingly even in that zone type, Japan allows home owners to designate up to 50 square meters (500 sqft) to operate as a commercial storefront. So even in the most restrictive neighborhoods, people can operate small boutique shops and small markets. Most towns in Japan designate most of their land as industrial zones to allow for free-form libertarian development.

When it comes time to build on land in Japan there isn’t a Byzantine permitting process, as long as the building conforms to the national standards and set-back formulas, you are good to go.

Another limitation in North American development is fire codes. In anything taller than 2 stories, most North American jurisdictions require two stairwells for egress. Seattle is one notable exception. Most European countries allow for up to 4 stories with just one stairwell. This has a cascading effect basically causing developers in North America to not build many multi-bedroom apartments in town centers. Most new high and medium density development in North America is limited to studio and 1-bedroom apartments. Allowing for 1 stairwell allows for ergonomic layouts that make better use of building corners. Most middle class families simply don’t have the option to live in town and city centers in North America largely in part because of the fire code effects and the zoning regulations previously mentioned.

All of what I’ve outlined is not to say that my goal is to force everyone into shoebox, Soviet-style apartments. It’s quite the contrary. The goal is to increase availability of all types of housing, while also preserving open space, so that those who appreciate living out in the middle of nowhere aren’t inundated by sprawl, and so they too have more options.

My thesis is that the masses don’t want to homestead out in the middle of nowhere, don’t want to live in cookie cutter suburbia, and they don’t want to live next to the inner city projects. Rather, the masses would prefer to live in traditional New England urban villages that are similar to that of contemporary Japan and the Netherlands. These villages offer a proven model that combines density with livability, showing how we can build communities that people actually want to live in rather than just places they can afford to live.

Showing scale of the universe with Metric A4 paper

Most of the world uses paper called A4, which is slightly narrower and longer than US/Canadian letter paper. The A-series paper has a neat property, because of its dimensions, that if you fold it in half, it will still have the same aspect ratio. So A5 is half of A4, which is half of A3 and so forth. A0 is one square meter in area.

This video I found makes my inner physicist chuckle because it shows the scale of the universe relative to A4 paper. Reminds me of Formi questions for Science Olympiad. It also reminds me of an often cited book in computer science called “A pattern language”, written by an architect named Christopher Alexander, which explores how everything in the universe is repeated patterns that scale.