Time is of the essence. Fortunately, there’s Agenda: a date-focused note-taking app for both planning and documenting your projects. Its timeline enables you to view the history of your projects. You can also place notes directly on the calendar so you can be prepared for anything.
Because Agenda is a link-friendly app, you can copy links to your notes and paste them wherever you need them.
We’re delighted to announce that Apple design award winner, Agenda, is our Partner of the Month of October!
Today, Agenda has published an article on Using Hookmark to Integrate Agenda with Other Apps and Resources.
What’s more today, Momenta has released Agenda 16!
Agenda has a very special place in my heart ❤️
Agenda is developed by Momenta which was co-founded by Alexander Griekspoor and Drew McCormack. Drew and Alexander, like myself, are scientists-turned-founders who develop software to support knowledge work. Alexander founded Mekentosj which developed the Papers bibliography management app. I used Papers 2 and 3 for writing academic bibliographies. Alexander subsequently sold Papers app to Springer, worked for them for a while, and then went off to found other companies, including Momenta.
Drew McCormack also develops the Studies app, which has been on my radar for over a decade.
Studies is a flashcard app for the serious student, with editions for Mac®, iPhone® and iPad®. It’s a tool to extend your knowledge, and it doesn’t matter what it is you want to learn. Learn a language, get a medical or law degree, prepare for your driving test, internalize aviation procedures, and much, much more. From simple day-to-day tidbits, to knowledge of life changing importance. Studies is an app to help you achieve your learning goals.
As readers of my Cognitive Productivity books know, I am a big proponent of productive practice — which leverages R&D in deliberate practice, test-enhanced learning, testing effects and more. Studies app can be used for several aspects of productive practice.
Timing developer Daniel Alm told me about Agenda over email in early January 2018. It was clear to Daniel and me that the design philosophy of Agenda was very compatible with Hookmark (then known internally as “myMeta”, as it was still in stealth). Agenda is a note-taking app that values linking all material together. So, I joined the Agenda beta.
It did not disappoint! That year, Agenda won an Apple Design Award highlighting excellence in app design. Within a year they were able to write:
Agenda has been installed on more than one million devices! And it is growing all the time: Agenda was installed around 100K times in its first three months on sale; in the last three months we have seen it installed as many as 350K times.
I was and remain very impressed. Despite its power, Agenda is very elegant and approachable.
Helpful and open pricing strategies
Pricing software is a difficult challenge. Get it wrong, and your business tanks. It’s as rare as it is generous for an entrepreneur to publicly write about their pricing model, let alone in helpful detail!
And yet, in early 2018, Drew McCormack wrote an excellent long-form article about how they would price Agenda: A ‘Cash Cow’ is on the Agenda | Medium. Drew kindly followed up that article in 2020 with Cash Cow Revisited| Medium.
Drew’s article had a huge influence on CogSci Apps’ pricing — as did the Timing app and Sketch apps models.
Lovely community
In 2018, we carefully surveyed how Mac developers create a community around their products. Agenda and The Omni Group were excellent role models for us. They were (and still are) using Discourse. David Sparks published a useful Mac Power Users episode interviewing Joe Buhlig about Discourse. Discourse was created by Jeff Atwood, who — like us — values civilized discourse. We followed Agenda and The Omni Group’s leadership, opting for Discourse.
Agenda values interoperability and links!
Immediately after taking Agenda for a spin in early 2018, I told the CogSci Apps team that we need to ensure Hookmark works well with Agenda! We quickly achieved some measure of integration in private betas. By the time our Mac app launched, the integration was good enough to include. Thanks to Agenda understanding the value of automating linking, and extending their x-callback-url methods, we repeatedly improved the integration with Agenda. As Agenda extended its linking API, we updated Hookmark to leverage the improvement. This year, for instance, we finalized the Hook to New > Agenda item function, which we mentioned in a recent newsletter.
I’d like to emphasize that Agenda treats links as first class citizens, in accordance with the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, which Drew has co-signed and you can too.
Agenda notes can be connected to anything
Enough about the history! The bottom line is that Agenda is a powerful, accessible, link-friendly, well priced note-taking app for Mac, iPhone and iPad. So, check out:
- Using Hookmark to Integrate Agenda with Other Apps and Resources – in Agenda’s Community, written by Drew McCormack.
- Using Hookmark With Agenda – on our website.
- Agenda’s website for more information and a link to its download.
Share your thoughts about Agenda on the Hookmark forum, and Agenda’s forum.