Skip to content

My Favourite iPad Pro Apps (2020)

2020-01-14 · Tech review, setup or bag tour · Ali · recording, 26:12 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Tools, apps and tech · mode: Review and recommendation · tags: Sponsor segment present, His own products discussed, His own numbers

Ali's annual tour of his 35 favourite iPad Pro apps for 2020, grouped as create, consume, coordinate, connect and cerebrate: Drafts, Notion and Evernote as his long-term memory, Notability over GoodNotes, Instapaper and Kindle highlights synced to Evernote by Readwise, Superhuman and Todoist; he says the apps matter less than the principles.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — 35 favourite iPad Pro apps in five categories

00:00:24 — Create: Drafts, Notion and the Workflow series on Nebula

  • ★★ Ali calls Drafts a really great tool for quick capture: whenever he has a thought he can open it on his iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch or Mac and start writing straight away. — 00:00:24 · Drafts, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali calls Drafts a nicer alternative to Apple's default Notes app, which has no built-in dictation support. — 00:00:54 · Drafts
  • ★★ Ali uses Notion to organise pretty much everything in his life, such as all his video ideas. — 00:01:23 · Notion
  • ★★ Since 23 September 2019 Ali has tracked his gym workouts in Notion and has gone 19 times; after a ten-day break he went back to the gym only on the day he filmed this video. — 00:01:23 · Notion
  • ★★ Ali has put videos in a new series, Workflow, on Nebula: four so far, with many more to come. — 00:01:52 · Workflow series, Nebula
  • ★★ Ali wanted Workflow to be a deep dive into the niche, nerdy specifics of how he uses his apps to maximise his productivity, a granular level of detail that he says does not work well on YouTube. — 00:01:52 · Workflow series, YouTube
  • ★★ Ali describes Nebula as a new streaming platform built by a team of creators, himself among them: a playground for experimenting with content without worrying about the YouTube algorithm. — 00:01:52 · Nebula

00:02:27 — CuriosityStream sponsor read

00:02:57 — Create: Evernote, Ulysses, Bear, Notability, Day One, Lightroom, Spark Post

  • ★★ Ali has used Evernote since about 2011 and, to viewers who ask why he has not replaced it with Notion, says he does not see Notion as replacing Evernote. — 00:02:57 · Evernote, Notion
  • ★★★ Ali thinks of Evernote as his long-term memory: he uses Notion for project management, to-do lists and important but not urgent projects, and Evernote to store archives, highlights from books and articles, and random bits of his writing. — 00:03:26 · Evernote, Notion
  • ★★ Evernote's strength for Ali is search: writing a newsletter on productivity, he searches the word and gets every note with it that he has saved since 2011, which apps like Notion cannot quite do yet. — 00:03:55 · Evernote, Notion
  • ★★ Ali might one day replace Evernote with a new note-taking app and will try apps like Roam Research, but suspects Evernote will be a big part of his second brain for a long time. (hedged) — 00:03:55 · Evernote, Roam Research, second brain
  • ★★ Ali calls Ulysses, a writing app for iPad and Mac only, the nicest writing experience he has ever had, and opens it for long-form writing such as his weekly email newsletter. — 00:04:35 · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali thinks his weekly email newsletter, Sunday Snippets, is at issue 95. (hedged) — 00:05:05 · Sunday Snippets
  • ★★ Ali describes Bear as a cross between Drafts and Ulysses: a good catch-all note-taking app and a nice Markdown writing experience that can publish to PDF, text or Word documents, WordPress and Ghost. — 00:05:34 · Drafts
  • ★ Listening to a podcast at the gym, such as a Tim Ferriss episode with Jim Collins, Ali might take a few notes in Bear on his iPhone, noting the timestamp of each point. — 00:06:03 · Tim Ferriss
  • ★★ Ali does not use Bear much any more: Drafts has largely replaced it for him because Drafts runs on the Apple Watch and has amazing dictation features. — 00:06:03 · Drafts, Apple Watch
  • ★★★ Ali uses Notability for handwritten notes, because the other note-taking apps he uses have poor Apple Pencil support. — 00:06:32 · Notability, Apple Pencil
  • ★★ In a lecture Ali writes his notes by hand in Notability because, he says, there is lots of evidence that handwriting notes is better for retention and understanding than typing them while listening. — 00:06:32 · Notability
  • ★★ Ali has GoodNotes installed but, after extensive testing of both, decided Notability was better. — 00:07:02 · GoodNotes, Notability
  • ★★ Ali says he is going to make a more dedicated review of GoodNotes versus Notability, because everyone seems to ask that question. — 00:07:02 · GoodNotes, Notability
  • ★★ Ali calls Day One the best journaling app for iPad, iOS and Mac; he keeps several journals in it, including his private journal. — 00:07:31 · Day One, iPad Pro
  • ★★ When he is feeling sad, Ali flicks through his Day One journal of nice comments from viewers. — 00:08:01 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali keeps a memorabilia journal in Day One: he photographs birthday cards, letters and the like that he wants to throw away, because he does not like keeping paper around. — 00:08:01 · Day One
  • ★★ Ali uses Lightroom for all his photo editing before posting photos on Instagram. — 00:08:30 · Adobe Lightroom, Instagram
  • ★★ Ali makes all his thumbnails in Adobe Spark Post, where he adds a photo and moves elements around. — 00:09:22
  • ★★★ Ali saves articles he wants to read later to Instapaper, through its share extensions on iOS or its email address. — 00:09:47

00:10:04 — Consume: Instapaper, Kindle, Spotify, Unread

  • ★★ Ali highlights passages of articles in Instapaper, and his highlights sync automatically to Evernote through a service called Readwise. — 00:10:33 · Evernote
  • ★★ Ali reads little in the Kindle app on his iPad, but to take notes on a nonfiction book he opens it in Kindle in split screen with Drafts, Ulysses or Bear. — 00:11:32 · Kindle, iPad, Drafts, iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali has highlighted on Kindle since 2010 or 2008, when he first got one, and all his Kindle highlights sync to Evernote through Readwise. (hedged) — 00:12:01 · Kindle, Evernote
  • ★★ Spotify is Ali's music streaming app of choice: he tried for about six months to switch exclusively to Apple Music, could not, and went back to Spotify. — 00:12:30 · Spotify
  • ★★ Ali's best-known Spotify playlist, Study With Me, has 23,700 followers and about a thousand instrumental tracks: classical, film and TV music such as Planet Earth, Hans Zimmer and Game of Thrones. — 00:13:00 · Spotify, Game of Thrones
  • ★★ Ali studies to instrumental tracks because songs without words do not interfere with word processing, which some evidence says is bad for learning, and they make studying much more fun. — 00:13:00 · Spotify
  • ★★ RSS feeds, which Ali reads in the Unread app, are how he keeps up with all the blogs he follows. — 00:13:29
  • ★★ Ali says he will make a Workflow video on Nebula about RSS feeds: how to set one up, with Feedly, how to get it into an app and their uses. — 00:13:29 · Workflow series, Nebula
  • ★★ Answering newsletter readers who ask how he finds the good articles he shares in Sunday Snippets, Ali says it is all based on RSS feeds. — 00:13:58 · Sunday Snippets

00:14:34 — CuriosityStream sponsor read

00:15:13 — Consume: YouTube, PDF Expert

  • ★★ Ali has recently started reading PDFs in PDF Expert instead of only in Notability, where he could annotate them with the Apple Pencil: PDF Expert works out a PDF's structure so he can skip between sections. — 00:15:13 · Notability, Apple Pencil
  • ★★ Ali's email client is Superhuman: it costs $30 a month, but it has sped up his email by about two times, and given how much time he spends on email he is more than happy to pay. — 00:15:55

00:16:14 — Coordinate: Superhuman, Fantastical, Todoist, YT Studio, Google Drive, Frame.io, Xero, Dashlane

  • ★★ Fantastical is Ali's calendar app of choice, mainly for its natural language processing: an event typed as a sentence gets its time and place recognised, so he now actually uses a calendar. — 00:16:42
  • ★★★ Ali now manages his to-do lists in Todoist: a year earlier he was using Things 3, but he tried Todoist because it is more cross-platform. — 00:16:42 · Things 3

  • ★★★ Ali says the apps really do not matter: what matters is the principles, and any app that does the job fulfils that purpose. — 00:17:31

    “The apps really don't matter. What matters is the principles”

  • ★★ Ali puts small, time-sensitive tasks in Todoist, such as a shopping list, watering the plants, calling his grandmother or submitting something to the BMJ, and bigger projects such as an online course or a video series in Notion. — 00:17:57 · Notion, Ali Abdaal's grandmother

  • ★★ Ali replies to viewers' specific questions in YouTube comments through the YouTube Studio app, which shows all the comments across his videos in chronological order. — 00:18:27 · YouTube
  • ★ Ali stores basically his entire life on Google Drive, and reviews the edits of his editor Christian on Frame.io, commenting at timestamps in the video. — 00:18:59 · Google Drive, Christian
  • ★★ Ali is in several Slack groups, among them Rad Reads, for followers of the blogger Khe Hy (as heard), where people are friendly and share recommendations of interesting articles. — 00:19:28 · Slack

00:19:45 — Connect: Slack, Discord, Tweetbot, Messages

  • ★★ Ali is also in the Slack groups of Forte Labs, whose course Building a Second Brain he took a few months earlier, and of Standard, the creators' agency he belongs to, which built Nebula. — 00:20:14 · Slack, Building a Second Brain, Nebula
  • ★ Ali's team, his editor Christian and other people who help with writing content, chat in a Slack channel he calls the A Team. — 00:20:14 · Christian, Slack
  • ★★ Ali set up a Discord server a few weeks earlier: it has 259 people online and, he thinks, about 5,000 members, with bots and groups for homework help, studying, podcasts, books, productivity and tech. (hedged) — 00:20:43
  • ★★ Ali goes on his Discord server to chat with people in real time when he does not feel like making a video, and wants to use it more, maybe for gaming, once he has real time off work. (hedged) — 00:21:12
  • ★★ Messages syncing across his iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac and iPad is probably one of the main reasons Ali uses no non-Apple products: he can reply to texts on any device, which with an Android phone he could do only on the phone. (hedged) — 00:21:42 · iPad Pro, Apple Watch

00:22:06 — Cerebrate: Brilliant, Skillshare, Anki, TabsHD, Notion for studying

  • ★★ Ali has his own Skillshare course on editing videos in Final Cut Pro: some 33 or 35 videos, three hours and 15 minutes long. (hedged) — 00:22:06 · Final Cut Pro
  • ★★ Anki is Ali's flashcard app of choice: he used it throughout medical school for drugs, anatomy and more, and now uses it to prepare for his postgraduate medical exams. — 00:22:51 · Anki
  • ★★ Ali says he will make many more in-depth videos on using Anki for his postgraduate exams, probably first in the Workflow series on Nebula, then distilling those that do well into YouTube videos in a few months. (hedged) — 00:22:51 · Anki, Workflow series, Nebula
  • ★★ Ali has Tabs HD transpose songs down, one of them set at minus five, because his voice is too deep to sing them at their normal pitch. — 00:23:15
  • ★★ Ali also studies in Notion: under each physiology topic, such as nerves, he keeps related essays, his key active recall questions and all his notes, hiding information under toggles. — 00:23:44 · Notion, active recall

00:24:29 — Nebula and CuriosityStream plug and sign-off

In the description and comments

  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): Asked how much iPad Pro storage a student, editor or everyday user needs, the channel answers that 128 GB is fine. — creator comment · iPad Pro
  • ★★ Ali Abdaal (channel): To a viewer who does not see why Ali uses so many overlapping apps, the channel replies that a carpenter has a toolbox with lots of different screwdrivers. — creator comment

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: Evernote · iPad Pro · Notability · Notion

Also: People: Ali Abdaal's grandmother · Christian · Jim Collins · Khe Hy · Taylor Swift · Thomas Frank · Tim Ferriss

Projects: Sunday Snippets · Workflow series

Works: Building a Second Brain · Game of Thrones · Journal of Medical Ethics · Oxford Handbook of Emergency Medicine

Organizations: BMJ · Brilliant · CuriosityStream · Forte Labs · Instagram · Nebula · Rad Reads · Standard

Concepts: active recall · quick capture · resonance calendar · second brain

Products: Adobe Lightroom · Adobe Spark Post · Android · Anki · Apple Music · Apple Notes · Apple Pencil · Apple Watch · Bear · Dashlane · Day One · Discord · Drafts · Fantastical · Feedly · Final Cut Pro · Frame.io · Ghost · GoodNotes · Google Drive · iMessage · Instapaper · iPhone · Kindle · Microsoft Word · PDF Expert · Readwise · Roam Research · Slack · Smart Keyboard · Spotify · Superhuman · Tabs HD · Things 3 · Todoist · Tweetbot · Ulysses · Unread · WordPress · Xero · YouTube Studio

Replies to

Replied to by

← Previous: 15 Lessons that Improved My Life · Next → A Productive Day in the Life vlog