Here's my 2 cents on Craft as someone working in technology and heavily relying on documentation tools but failed to adopt it as a daily tool despite many attempts:
First, the good part:
Craft has absolutely every feature you could imagine and is incredibly sleek and well-designed.
Now the issue:
I can't use this tool for document/note taking in my workflows because it cramps every feature in the UI, which results in endless different views, confusing navigation and animations, and hidden elements behind multi-slide navs.
I'll emphasize the first part again: Craft is literally the best-developed note-taking tool I've tried. However, it seems that whoever is managing this product is prioritizing adding every single imaginable feature rather than just focusing on how users actually write notes and documents. This is fairly frustrating because I would truly love to use it daily.
I went through the Craft website and read some Reddit posts, and from my understanding, the product is meant to be a "Note"-taking app but with a leap towards turning notes into documents.
This is awesome, but it seems like core elements of note-taking have been dismissed, and when I use the app, I am not sure if it's trying to be Notion, Canva, Google Drive, Eraser, or another tool.
Here are some examples:
For my desktop note taking app, the top priorities are:
1. Create notes quickly
2. Find notes quickly
3. The ability to quickly turn text into a heading/bulletpoint etc
Everywhere I go in Craft, I end up getting a different view or UI: in one place, my "notes" are ordered in a grid, in another, in a list, and some notes seem to have "nested" notes, which is ridiculously confusing. I truly fail to understand the point of this, especially as it results in extremely confusing navigation.
Then, the tabs: Tabs are great, but just because you can put a search icon that resizes into a search bar in the current active tab is possible does not mean you should. Sure, it's impressive UI, but if i want to switch a tab, the last thing I want is for it to resize on hover to then click the close button or search bar by mistake.
For the sake of efficiency, Move the tabs to their own line, do not resize them on hover to avoid confusing the user, and leave the search bar on its own line. Also, maybe reduce the font sizes to preserve UI real estate.
Text editing: You've added a "quick" text editor, which is essential, but it doesn't include changing text to a heading or sub heading. Instead the quick menu offers the user to highlight text. So to change text to a heading you have to Select the text > Click on the sidebar > Click on format > Click on the heading.
I am fairly sure formatting a heading is far more performed than highlighting text.
The code blocks are awesome and offer full syntax highlighting and even theme changes? (Largely overkill if you're asking me, I genuinely don't see what made this a priority), but if you're gonna be adding a code block, the first thing you'll need to do is change the language for proper highlighting. You'd think that can be done on double click? But no, you need to > Double click > Click the "elipsis" icon > click on "Language" > Search for the language you want to use.
I could list many other examples of how Craft has become a frustrating tool for normal workflows.
If I am writing notes, I'll spend 90% of the time writing and formatting them. I am not expecting to be taken through a UI presentation of every possible animation, masonry layout, or UI component.
It's crazy because, for me, this could be the best notes-taking app ever made if they just removed a bunch of stuff and simplified the UI to prioritize putting controls where they should be.
