Craft Note App – Make a Wiki

Creating a Wiki Using Craft

One of the good things about using Craft is that it’s available on iOS devices as well as being on the Mac. I like being able to work on the same file whatever device am using at the time. This gives it an advantage over the application Obsidian. (Obsidian will have an iOS app at some point in time) I don’t need to do any special computer kung fu to get data from one platform to the other when using Craft.

Making Links in Craft

It’s really easy to make links from one page to another. You type in a couple of open square brackets or an ampersand, followed by the first letter or couple of letters of the page you want to link to. Press enter and you have a link between the two pages. The backlink is created at the same time. It’s also possible to create a link to an item on the same page. Of course, if you want to make a link to a new page, you can do that too. Go and fill in the data of the new page whenever you are ready. If you change the title of a page then the link changes to reflect that change. Select a word to get a context sensitive menu. Apart from the styling options you have ways to link from that word. Either link to a web site with a URL or to something else in your Craft documents. Basically, Craft is fantastic for creating wiki documents.

Functional and Pretty Too

The documents created are visually attractive. Set blocks within the document to be titles or body text, bold, italics, strikethrough or code, as well as use colours and four basic fonts. You have all the types of list you could need. The page can show a cover image which makes it easier to identify the page in front of you. When you are possibly jumping from one page to another it is super to have visual clues to help. Great for visual learners to have pictures and colours. Within the document you can include to-do items, ordered and unordered lists. It’s also possible to indent the blocks. You can even add a cover image either from pictures you have on your system or from UnSplash. All of these ways of making a page personalised in its looks helps those of us who are visual learners. There are other ways to make blocks of text stand out. Give it a declaration of focus or block, or both. It makes the whole block stand out more. Focus puts a vertical line to the left of the text. While block gives the text a coloured background to make it more prominent. Or you can turn the block of text into a card or a page. The pages option lets you open the block as a page and fill it with more stuff. The cards can be given styles to really make them stand out. Put groups, pages, cards and whatever else inside these page or card blocks.

(Mac) Double click on a card to get inside it. With pages you have a small arrow inside a circle to the right of the block to go in and add more content.
(iOS) Tap on either, to go directly into the page, card or group. Or tap and hold then move the item to open in split view or slide over as a separate instance.

Add images to your notes with drag and drop. It will take the new Apple format of .HEIC and .JPG but does not do .PNG. I use a shortcut in the shortcuts app to convert and resize images.

What About the Cost of Craft

The app is free up to 1000 blocks. Seems like a lot but it could very quickly get to the limit and you will have to decide if you want to pay a subscription to continue. $3.75 a month if you pay annually or $4.99 a month when paying monthly. I already have too many things I pay for by subscription. Drafts and Ulysses is what I have for dealing with text and I pay annually. I wouldn’t want to replace either of those with Craft, however lovely Craft is. Craft can do things other note taking apps can’t do and that might just make you stump up the money. I have to admit I’m tempted. Another option for making linked documents would be to us mind-mapping software like iThoughts. You get a better overall view of a structure of links. It is more for an overview / outline rather than the rich document possible with Craft.