The OS X Notes toolbar also includes a lock button at the right end of the buttons in the center of the screen when in full screen mode. A locked note won't show the contents on the screen when the user selects it. The preview line below the note's title also goes away in the notes list left of the note. Notebook brings the familiarity and ease-of-use of your smartphone to your Mac. With a trackpad, you can navigate Notebook without making a single click. Simply hover over a notebook or note and pinch to open and close notes and notebooks. Hover on a note or notebook and two finger swipe to see more information, lock, or delete.
Incredible music.
In the key of easy.
GarageBand is a fully equipped music creation studio right inside your Mac — with a complete sound library that includes instruments, presets for guitar and voice, and an incredible selection of session drummers and percussionists. With Touch Bar features for MacBook Pro and an intuitive, modern design, it's easy to learn, play, record, create, and share your hits worldwide. Now you're ready to make music like a pro.
Start making professional‑sounding music right away. Plug in your guitar or mic and choose from a jaw‑dropping array of realistic amps and effects. You can even create astonishingly human‑sounding drum tracks and become inspired by thousands of loops from popular genres like EDM, Hip Hop, Indie, and more.
More sounds, more inspiration.
Plug in your USB keyboard and dive into the completely inspiring and expanded Sound Library, featuring electronic‑based music styles like EDM and Hip Hop. The built‑in set of instruments and loops gives you plenty of creative freedom.
The Touch Bar takes center stage.
The Touch Bar on MacBook Pro puts a range of instruments at your fingertips. Use Performance view to turn the Touch Bar into drum pads or a one-octave keyboard for playing and recording.
Plug it in. Tear it up.
Plug in your guitar and choose from a van-load of amps, cabinets, and stompboxes.
Design your dream bass rig.
Customize your bass tone just the way you want it. Mix and match vintage or modern amps and speaker cabinets. You can even choose and position different microphones to create your signature sound.
Drumroll please.
GarageBand features Drummer, a virtual session drummer that takes your direction and plays along with your song. Choose from 28 drummers and three percussionists in six genres.
Shape your sound. Quickly and easily.
Whenever you're using a software instrument, amp, or effect, Smart Controls appear with the perfect set of knobs, buttons, and sliders. So you can shape your sound quickly with onscreen controls or by using the Touch Bar on MacBook Pro.
Look, Mom — no wires.
You can wirelessly control GarageBand right from your iPad with the Logic Remote app. Play any software instrument, shape your sound with Smart Controls, and even hit Stop, Start, and Record from across the room.
Jam with drummers of every style.
Drummer, the virtual session player created using the industry's top session drummers and recording engineers, features 28 beat‑making drummers and three percussionists. From EDM, Dubstep, and Hip Hop to Latin, Metal, and Blues, whatever beat your song needs, there's an incredible selection of musicians to play it.
Each drummer has a signature kit that lets you produce a variety of groove and fill combinations. Use the intuitive controls to enable and disable individual sounds while you create a beat with kick, snare, cymbals, and all the cowbell you want. If you need a little inspiration, Drummer Loops gives you a diverse collection of prerecorded acoustic and electronic loops that can be easily customized and added to your song.
Powerful synths with shape‑shifting controls.
Get creative with 100 EDM- and Hip Hop–inspired synth sounds. Every synth features the Transform Pad Smart Control, so you can morph and tweak sounds to your liking.
Learn to play
Welcome to the school of rock. And blues. And classical.
Get started with a great collection of built‑in lessons for piano and guitar. Or learn some Multi‑Platinum hits from the actual artists who recorded them. You can even get instant feedback on your playing to help hone your skills.
Note Chomper Mac Os 11
Take your skills to the next level. From any level.
Choose from 40 different genre‑based lessons, including classical, blues, rock, and pop. Video demos and animated instruments keep things fun and easy to follow.
Teachers with advanced degrees in hit‑making.
Learn your favorite songs on guitar or piano with a little help from the original recording artists themselves. Who better to show you how it's done?
Instant feedback.
Play along with any lesson, and GarageBand will listen in real time and tell you how you're doing, note for note. Track your progress, beat your best scores, and improve your skills.
Tons of helpful recording and editing features make GarageBand as powerful as it is easy to use. Edit your performances right down to the note and decibel. Fix rhythm issues with a click. Finesse your sound with audio effect plug‑ins. And finish your track like a pro, with effects such as compression and visual EQ.
Go from start to finish. And then some.
Create and mix up to 255 audio tracks. Easily name and reorder your song sections to find the best structure. Then polish it off with all the essentials, including reverb, visual EQ, volume levels, and stereo panning.
Take your best take.
Record as many takes as you like. You can even loop a section and play several passes in a row. GarageBand saves them all in a multi‑take region, so it's easy to pick the winners.
Your timing is perfect. Even when it isn't.
Played a few notes out of time? Simply use Flex Time to drag them into place. You can also select one track as your Groove Track and make the others fall in line for a super‑tight rhythm.
Polish your performance.
Capture your changes in real time by adjusting any of your software instruments' Smart Controls while recording a performance. You can also fine‑tune your music later in the Piano Roll Editor.
Touch Bar. A whole track at your fingertips.
The Touch Bar on MacBook Pro lets you quickly move around a project by dragging your finger across a visual overview of the track.
Wherever you are, iCloud makes it easy to work on a GarageBand song. You can add tracks to your GarageBand for Mac song using your iPhone or iPad when you're on the road. Or when inspiration strikes, you can start sketching a new song idea on your iOS device, then import it to your Mac to take it even further.
GarageBand for iOS
Play, record, arrange, and mix — wherever you go.
GarageBand for Mac
Your personal music creation studio.
Logic Remote
A companion app for Logic Pro.
The best note taking apps for Mac – markdown, open format, cross platform
Published (updated: ) in Productivity.
With the release of iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 in 2016, Apple introduced a new version of Notes. It added a number of new features for formatting, drawing and sync using iCloud instead of via IMAP. It was lightweight, fast and simple. I started using it shortly afterwards and now have almost 1,000 notes ranging from book highlights to saved web pages to meeting notes to journal articles.
Unfortunately, the iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 releases have been incredibly buggy. I have found that sync is inconsistent across devices (my MacBook, iPad and iPhone each register different numbers of notes) and some notes are not syncing at all. Search also stopped working before fixing itself, and now returns inferior results.
Considering how much information I have stored in Apple Notes, this made me reconsider what I wanted from a note taking app.
Requirements for a note taking app
Simplicity
I only require basic formatting, images and tables. I'm not interested in fancy fonts or colours because the system is better at ensuring the formatting works across devices, screen sizes and rendering into the future e.g. if I ever need to increase font sizes. This means using Markdown formatting saved to a plain text file. Markdown is a well understood format that has many apps that can edit and render on any platform
Non-proprietary format
The 'new' Apple Notes app moved away from IMAP to an iCloud based format. This made sync work better (until recently) but was necessarily a proprietary database format. I can't easily see or edit the individual notes on disk to make backups or import to another app. They are contained in a SQL Lite database in ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.notes alongside attachments and images organised by internal note IDs. It's usually dangerous to meddle with app files like this.
Apple Notes doesn't have an export option except individual notes as PDFs. The only way around this is using the Apple Privacy data download service which allows you to export Apple Notes as HTML with their associated attachments. This is how I have been keeping a backup of all my Apple Notes to date.
Ideally the app will allow editing of individual files on disk. I can then choose my own sync service and run backup as part of my normal approach using Arq. Any app should at least allow export of content to multiple formats.
Regular updates / actively maintained
The problem with Apple software is that their main revenue is generated by the core OS, not any of the apps. They are there to compliment the OS but there is no competitive incentive to keep them up to date, add new features and fix bugs.
The annual update cycle is a legacy from the old days of shipping physical software. This makes sense for annual iPhone hardware refreshes but is totally outdated for shipping software. Microsoft updates Office every month and Windows every 6 months. How do you report bugs or get support for Apple Notes? You can't.
My experience with the poor quality of these latest Apple releases has changed my approach – if I am going to rely on software then I want the developer to be properly incentivised to maintain it i.e. I need to pay them directly for it.
This is one reason why I use and pay for 1Password vs using Apple iCloud Keychain (as well as all the other features 1Password has). It's also why I don't mind the move to subscription business models for software.
Search
My approach to note taking is to save the full text and associated files of things I find interesting or useful so I can search them in the future.
Spotlight Search on macOS is very good (and has some advanced options). Even though I keep my files well organised, I regularly use it to find things because it is quicker and searches inside documents. For some reason, Apple Notes are not searchable from Spotlight though, so I have to search twice – in Spotlight and in Notes.app. I would prefer to have everything searchable from Spotlight, or any other search tool.
Cross-platform
This is not a requirement but rather a 'nice to have' if the app I use on macOS also has an iOS equivalent. If all the above requirements are met, I can easily edit open file formats from different apps on different platforms.
My Macbook Air (13″ 2018) is only a year old so I have no plans to replace it soon, although have had to send it in for 1 keyboard replacement already. I don't mind the feel of this keyboard but the reliability is poor.
Given the state of Apple software quality and the general problems with the Macbook keyboards, I have been following Microsoft's Surface products with interest. The Surface Laptop 3 is very nice. I've been into the London Microsoft store to have a play and I'm eager to see the Surface Pro X when it is released. I'm just unsure about Windows. Over a decade ago it was Windows Vista that forced me to move to Mac due to the poor quality. I'm not quite there with macOS yet but am unhappy with it.
Evaluating note taking apps
All together I have been re-evaluating my choice of key software to ensure that I'm tied to the Apple ecosystem as little as possible. I already use Office365 for my email and calendar but have also started to move my files to OneDrive from iCloud Drive (I'm glad I didn't try the recent macOS betas!). What's the difference? I pay Microsoft for these services and they are regularly updated (unlike iCloud for Windows) and maintained, probably because they directly generate $billions of direct revenue.
Ultimately, my goal is to be flexible in which platform I use, selected based on the best core OS and hardware. I don't want to be restricted by apps and file formats that only work on a single platform. macOS remains the best OS for now (including for privacy) but I don't want to be locked to it.
My recommended note taking apps
Based on reviewing all the apps below, these are the best notes apps for Mac:
- Bear: Simple, well designed UI, actively maintained, markdown export but proprietary database. Mac / iOS only.
- iA Writer with your own cloud drive (I use OneDrive). Edits files on disk in Markdown format with simple, well designed apps for macOS, Windows, Android and iOS.
- VS Code with several markdown extensions (see below). If you are a developer and comfortable with a more technical interface, and/or already using VS Code, then this is a great third choice to avoid installing yet-another-app.
Bear
Bear was my favourite app purely for Apple devices. Good tag support, Markdown rendering, strong search (including Spotlight integration), encrypted notes, embedded images and attachments, and multiple export options. I particularly liked the helper mechanism when linking between notes, which maintains the link even if you rename a note.
It is fully supported and actively developed for the Apple ecosystem. The entire company is based around the product and has a subscription business model, suggesting they are likely to be able to keep things going. The iOS and iPad apps work well and sync across from my Mac was always reliable. It actually uses iCloud behind the scenes which makes Apple Notes failure to sync more unusual.
Bear would be my recommendation for someone who was happy with staying on Mac/iOS. If needed, you can export to various different formats. I used it for a whole month (which is the length of the free trial – sync is not available in the free version) and it worked well.
The main reason I decided not to continue using it is that Bear uses a proprietary data format so it can sync with iCloud. This makes sense because their time is better spent on the app functionality rather than making cloud sync work, but I ultimately decided that I valued having open, plain text files more than the extra functionality. If I do eventually move to Windows then I would be unable to move my notes easily. Having an open format was the key to selecting iA Writer instead.
iA Writer
Although not designed for note taking, last year iA Writer added support for #hashtags (but only on Mac, not Windows) which makes it much more suitable as a notes app.
I really like the UI on macOS because it fits in perfectly with the system design guidelines. It is very lightweight, simple to use and fits all my criteria for editing files on disk with Markdown. It is very minimalist with few settings, forcing you to focus on the task at hand. There are also apps for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
iA Writer does not support attachments and the embedded image support is limited, but that actually forces you to store those files on disk (so files like PDFs can be searched by Spotlight and edited directly e.g. for highlighting, which doesn't work if you open PDFs from within a Bear note). Naming becomes important for binary files like images so they can be properly searched.
If you use iA Writer on iOS with iCloud then deals with sync for you but there is a limitation with using external file sources such as OneDrive – you have to manually find and add files into the app to edit them, which is a hassle. Otherwise, files are stored on disk and so I can sync them with OneDrive and run my normal backups. Since they are plain text Markdown, I can edit them in any app.
I would like to see the ability to nest tags and add emoji to them, plus helpers for Markdown formatting e.g. linking to other notes and improved image support. However, those limitations are minor enough to overlook and pick iA Writer as my Apple Notes replacement.
VS Code + Markdown extensions
VS Code supports markdown out of the box, including with a live preview, however there are several extensions which add extra functionality.
The final plugin is the crucial one because it allows me to take advantage of organising my notes by tag. Of course, VS Code's command bar is excellent at search so I could just navigate files by name (or text search), but it is sometimes useful to be able to see and view all associated notes in a list.
Unfortunately, the tag format supported by iA Writer – #hashtags – is not part of the Markdown format. Instead you will need to use the Markdown metadata format by including tags in a YAML block at the start of each file. The advantage of using this format is that it is generally supported by other Markdown parsers, so if I wanted to switch to something new in the future there is a greater chance of it being supported with no changes.
VS Code does use Electron behind the scenes. However, unlike many Electron apps, VS Code ties into the native UX of the OS it is running on and has acceptable performance. This is a rare example of a well-built Electron app, most of which are slow and buggy.
Other note taking apps I tried
Evernote
Years ago this was the first notes app I ever used, however it was notoriously buggy and I gave up. The company has been through some challenging times but still uses a proprietary note format and database, which rules it out. I didn't bother to try it because of the history of poor quality software.
Notable
It is fully supported and actively developed for the Apple ecosystem. The entire company is based around the product and has a subscription business model, suggesting they are likely to be able to keep things going. The iOS and iPad apps work well and sync across from my Mac was always reliable. It actually uses iCloud behind the scenes which makes Apple Notes failure to sync more unusual.
Bear would be my recommendation for someone who was happy with staying on Mac/iOS. If needed, you can export to various different formats. I used it for a whole month (which is the length of the free trial – sync is not available in the free version) and it worked well.
The main reason I decided not to continue using it is that Bear uses a proprietary data format so it can sync with iCloud. This makes sense because their time is better spent on the app functionality rather than making cloud sync work, but I ultimately decided that I valued having open, plain text files more than the extra functionality. If I do eventually move to Windows then I would be unable to move my notes easily. Having an open format was the key to selecting iA Writer instead.
iA Writer
Although not designed for note taking, last year iA Writer added support for #hashtags (but only on Mac, not Windows) which makes it much more suitable as a notes app.
I really like the UI on macOS because it fits in perfectly with the system design guidelines. It is very lightweight, simple to use and fits all my criteria for editing files on disk with Markdown. It is very minimalist with few settings, forcing you to focus on the task at hand. There are also apps for macOS, Windows, iOS and Android.
iA Writer does not support attachments and the embedded image support is limited, but that actually forces you to store those files on disk (so files like PDFs can be searched by Spotlight and edited directly e.g. for highlighting, which doesn't work if you open PDFs from within a Bear note). Naming becomes important for binary files like images so they can be properly searched.
If you use iA Writer on iOS with iCloud then deals with sync for you but there is a limitation with using external file sources such as OneDrive – you have to manually find and add files into the app to edit them, which is a hassle. Otherwise, files are stored on disk and so I can sync them with OneDrive and run my normal backups. Since they are plain text Markdown, I can edit them in any app.
I would like to see the ability to nest tags and add emoji to them, plus helpers for Markdown formatting e.g. linking to other notes and improved image support. However, those limitations are minor enough to overlook and pick iA Writer as my Apple Notes replacement.
VS Code + Markdown extensions
VS Code supports markdown out of the box, including with a live preview, however there are several extensions which add extra functionality.
The final plugin is the crucial one because it allows me to take advantage of organising my notes by tag. Of course, VS Code's command bar is excellent at search so I could just navigate files by name (or text search), but it is sometimes useful to be able to see and view all associated notes in a list.
Unfortunately, the tag format supported by iA Writer – #hashtags – is not part of the Markdown format. Instead you will need to use the Markdown metadata format by including tags in a YAML block at the start of each file. The advantage of using this format is that it is generally supported by other Markdown parsers, so if I wanted to switch to something new in the future there is a greater chance of it being supported with no changes.
VS Code does use Electron behind the scenes. However, unlike many Electron apps, VS Code ties into the native UX of the OS it is running on and has acceptable performance. This is a rare example of a well-built Electron app, most of which are slow and buggy.
Other note taking apps I tried
Evernote
Years ago this was the first notes app I ever used, however it was notoriously buggy and I gave up. The company has been through some challenging times but still uses a proprietary note format and database, which rules it out. I didn't bother to try it because of the history of poor quality software.
Notable
Notable is still very early in development, and the rough edges show e.g. when copy/pasting it would paste text 3 times. It also uses Electron and has many weird UI elements showing through the cross-platform layer, for example the popover menus for attachments don't have the same behaviour as menus should on macOS.
The management of attachments was not as good as Typora – it would copy them to an ‘attachments' directory but the management of those files was very basic. Removing the attachment from the note did not delete it on disk.
This app is too early to take over such an important use case and has no clear business model yet (donations and a pending application to Y Combinator).
Obsidian
Obsidian fits all the requirements – simple, works with Markdown and cross-platform.
It supports #hashtags, but they are shown in order of number of items rather than alphabetically and strangely there is no way to change the order.
It has some good functionality around linking to other notes and backlinks so you can see which notes reference each other. This makes it more like an organiser than a simple Markdown editor.
Note Chomper Mac Os Download
The app is nicely designed, but uses Electron so is slow to launch and doesn't fit into the native OS design as nicely as Bear or iA Writer. When you are using an app regularly, performance and UI consistency matters.
OneNote
Included with my Office365 subscription, OneNote has been improving rapidly and now has a much simpler UI and fast sync. One of the great features is character recognition in images, allowing them to be searched as if they were in plain text.
Notes can only be in a single section or Notebook (like Apple Notes) whereas I feel that tags are more flexible approach to organising things. OneNote supports tags but they are hard coded to specific types, which suggests there's still a lot of legacy cruft still behind the scenes.
OneNote on the web looks good with the new simplified UI and the Mac app also works nicely, particularly with dark mode. However, compared to all the other notes apps it is always slow to launch. Star trek: killer qegh mac os. I find this lag exists with all Microsoft apps on Mac – they are very heavyweight.
Using it with Office365 creates the Notebook file in your OneDrive but this is just a URL file that opens the web UI when you load it. There's no actual content in the file which means that OneNote is using a proprietary database behind the scenes.
Although OneNote is a regularly updated application that works cross-platform (and has a decent app for iOS as well), the lack of open file format means I can't back up the files and extract my data whenever I want. Like Apple Notes, there is no export functionality. I don't want to move from Apple's proprietary format to Microsoft's, so this rules it out.
Typora
Typora was promising because it is a good Markdown editor with cross-platform apps that manages files on disk. I particularly liked how it managed attachments for notes, creating a .assets folder with the same name as the parent note. However, it doesn't have very advanced file management features for the library/list of notes and there's no support for tags.
It also uses Electron and I really hate Electron based apps. They remind me of Java apps that almost get the native OS style right, but not quite. They feel brittle, tend to have poor performance and I found that Typora was buggy (the macOS version is in beta). I understand why developers use Electron because it allows you to build cross-platform apps using web technologies, but I've had bad experiences with them e.g. the poor performance of Slack.
Worth a mention
- Inkdrop is an app I've heard about because of the blogging of its main (Japan-based) developer. It fits most of my requirements and the UI looks great, but uses a proprietary format rather than files on disk. The format is JSON and you can set up your own CouchDB server to run the sync services, but that isn't something I'm interested in doing.
- nvALT hits all of my requirements except tag support, but is quite an old app (and looks it). The UI is why I excluded it, but I am keeping an eye on nvUltra which is the replacement in active beta now. It's not open for public use at time of writing so I couldn't try it yet. Since it supports Markdown, when it is released I will just be able to point it to the files I'm editing.
- Scrivener might be great for complex writing projects but it is far too sophisticated for a notes app.
- Simplenote is worth a look because they have well maintained apps and Markdown editing available for free. I excluded it because of the proprietary database format but generally like what Automattic do.
- Standard Notes looks interesting because it pledges privacy and longevity with how it manages your notes files. It has options to store attachments in Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive as well as automated backups there, but ultimately stores notes in a proprietary format (even if that format is open and you can run your own server because the code is open source). It doesn't use simple plain text files on the filesystem which is one of my requirements (and the desktop apps are Electron) – I don't really want to be messing around running my own server and MySQL database for notes. Potential option for power users but not what I'm looking for.
- Trilium Notes is another Electron app which is built around a hierarchical structure so you can build your own personal knowledgebase, whatever that means. It requires running a server, or has an unsupported Mac app. This makes it too complex for my requirements given the suitable alternatives above.
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See also
- A review of note taking apps for iOS/Mac from 2019.
- Another review of note taking apps but from 2017.
- A list of all text editors for iOS.
- 9to5Mac on the best note-taking apps for Mac in 2019.
