The team behind the note-taking app Craft<\/a> released a new version<\/a> this week, after months of beta testing and more than a year in development. It includes lots of changes, but three big ones: new ways to style your documents; a new section called Collections that lets you compile and organize related stuff; and a bunch of new task-management tools.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Craft works on Apple devices, Windows, and the web, and the team says Android is coming eventually. I\u2019ve been testing the beta for the last few months, and I absolutely love it. This new Craft is the best app I\u2019ve tried for managing both big projects and day-to-day life. It\u2019s still missing a few features, particularly on the to-do list front, but it is both beautifully designed and very powerful, and it just works the way my brain does. I am an incorrigible tester and switcher of note-taking apps, but I haven\u2019t quit Craft in months. And I don\u2019t plan to.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Craft 3 is actually a pivot for Craft, or maybe an un-pivot. Over the last few years, the company started to focus more on business users and selling to companies, co-founder Balint Orosz tells me. It added lots of permissions-management stuff, complex sharing tools, business integrations, and a million templates for middle managers, all chasing the lucrative but elusive B2B market. \u201cWe were no longer this simple product that anyone can adopt,\u201d Orosz says, \u201cbut we also weren\u2019t complex enough for businesses.\u201d Craft got stuck. That\u2019s also roughly when I stopped using the app.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n About a year ago, though, Orosz and his team just bailed on that plan and decided to get back to building an app for regular people. That meant simplifying everything about how it works, giving people the tools they actually need to manage their life (and, sure, their work) in the app, and ditching the rest. \u201cWe just said, \u2018let\u2019s build the best tool that helps you organize your life,\u2019\u201d Orosz says. \u201cYour entire<\/em> life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Documents are still the core of Craft, but in version 3 there are many more ways to add color, doodles, and backgrounds to them \u2014\u00a0Craft clearly noticed how many people like designing their Notion pages and decided to emphasize the same feature. Collections are also somewhat Notion-like: if you add a collection to a page it turns into a sortable table of information and even other documents, so you can organize things like you might in a Notion database.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n For me, though, it\u2019s the task integration that makes Craft really work. There\u2019s a new Tasks view in the app, which both compiles all your documents with tasks inside and provides a place to just make a standalone to-do list. In the Calendar view, you\u2019ll see all your tasks due today alongside your calendar events and daily notes. Tasks can have due dates, but not much else \u2014 if you\u2019re looking for priorities or recurring tasks or even subtasks, you\u2019re better off elsewhere. Orosz says he\u2019s fine with that. Most people, he thinks, just want checkboxes.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I also mostly want checkboxes, so this setup works for me. The app also integrates with Apple Reminders, which is an easy way to capture new things. But the Craft feature that really puts it over the top is the new quick-add window. You tap it and a text box appears \u2014\u00a0you can write in that text box and then choose to send it to your daily note, create a new note, or just add a task to your inbox. Or you can choose not to file it at all, and it sits in a list at the bottom of your screen. It\u2019s one of the fastest ways I\u2019ve seen to just write something down, which few apps manage to get right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n