Apple are renowned for the quality of their wares, premium products for a premium price. They spend a fortune on advertising and boasting that their shiny, sexy, tech is just better. Maybe that’s true, perhaps it isn’t, but people have bought into it, myself included.

They are more reticent when it comes to their native apps. Those are just there, already on your device(s) with little fanfare as to their capabilities. Calendar, Notes, Reminders, to name just a few — I use them and find them invaluable to my ecosystem of managing and utilising information.

Why Native Apple apps?

I left work as a mental health nurse six and a bit years ago to stay at home full-time and look after our three autistic children. Clearly, the loss of a wage necessitated a tightening of my app subscription wallet, so I took another look at the native Apple apps and took the plunge. Fantastical used iCloud calendar anyway, so that was easy. Ditto Reminders, all those were iCloud-based.

Notes took a bit of work, I had information spread all over the place.

Email, I also moved to iCloud. There was a lot of changing email addresses there, but as Google was already linked in Accounts not a massive deal. I have any lingering stragglers forwarded from Gmail now to my iCloud account, so even that is no longer linked.

And I’m happy. More than happy, I haven’t come across any major issues that’s made me regret cancelling subscriptions.

About The Apple Writer.

I need to make it clear from the outset, this is not intended to be a definitive guide. This is me sharing the way I use these apps and learning along the way. Maybe you’ll like some of it, adopt some ways, and dismiss others. That’s fine.

The site itself is likely to undergo subtle shifts too as I work out just what I want to achieve here.

The Initial Aim.

As things stand, my main focus is to write about the incredible writing app Ulysses and how I use these native apps with it.

As things stand, anyway.

It’s likely to take a few blog-posts to get to that and, as I say, there’s been very little planning besides a brief grasp of what I want to achieve. I’m a procrastinator and if I wait until everything is perfect, I’ll never get started.

So bear with me.

Next Time.

I’ll start off with a loved-up review of Ulysses and why it’s such a great space for all manner of writing.