Further thoughts on the notes application Reflect
This is a follow-up to an article I wrote about the notes app Reflect several months ago. I am happy to report that I am still using Reflect everyday as what I can best call my digital bullet journal.
Here’s my previous article, if you missed it (99.9999999999999999999 percent of the people on the planet have missed it):
https://medium.com/@stephenjzeoli/reflect-my-perfect-notes-application-af0978de3373
The things that make Reflect work for me have not changed:
- Clean interface
- Nearly friction-free note-taking and management
- Well-designed daily notes feature that allows me to scroll through my daily entries without having to click around on a calendar
- Unobtrusive AI
- Nicely designed backlinking and tagging that allow for intuitive connections among my notes
- End-to-End Encryption
- Off-line mode
While there is a MacOS version, I use the web edition, because I access Reflect while at my day job, which has me working on a Windows PC. Reflect also has an excellent iOS application. With it you cannot only access and create new text notes, but you can also dictate a note that then is uploaded into your daily notes.
I’m still unsatisfied with the export options. I can only export all my notes. To get a single note’s content into another app, I need to cut and paste. But it does this fairly well. Cutting and pasting this note into Craft retained the formatting nicely, for example.
There are other features that I haven’t taken much advantage of, but want to mention:
- I can connect Reflect to my Google and Apple calendars. Events show up in the right sidebar on the daily note day they are scheduled for. I can then, if I choose, add them into my daily note as an entry, with the option of creating a linked note for them. This facilitates the ability to take meeting notes, or record the results of an appointment.
- Reflect makes a stab at recommending similar notes in the right sidebar.
- Reflect keeps a history of the note I’m working on, so I can revert to a previous version.
- And Reflect provides the ability to share a note with others through a private link.
I imagine Reflect is very nearly considered a complete app by the developer. I don’t see any dramatic new features being added (just my gut feeling; I have no knowledge of the developer’s plans). So I am not recommending you get Reflect in hopes that it will add a favorite feature. I will mention two features I’d like to see (on top of better export options for single notes):
- The ability to highlight text with color
- The ability to email content into Reflect
The bottom line is I’m very happy and productive with Reflect. I recommend that anyone looking for an effective, almost frictionless digital bullet journal check it out.
