The Harbor blog
Building a second brain you can trust.
Notes from the team building Harbor — in public, in writing, and in plain English.
November 2, 2026
Notes apps without AI, and why bring-your-own beats built-in
Notion moved its paying workspaces to AI credits today. Here’s which notes apps put AI inside your notes, what it costs, how to turn it off where you can, the ones with none at all, and why we think the AI you already pay for beats the one bundled into your notes app.
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October 30, 2026
How to build a second brain with Claude
Almost every guide to a Claude second brain assumes Claude Code, a folder of Markdown and a terminal. Here’s the version for people who use Claude in a browser and on their phone: keep the second brain in your notes app, connect it, and write Claude one note to read first.
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October 29, 2026
How angry are people at their notes apps? We counted.
Nobody’s as angry as Evernote users were in 2023. But a newer complaint keeps turning up at the notes apps that have pushed it hardest: AI, and then a meter on it.
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October 28, 2026
How to connect ChatGPT to your notes
ChatGPT’s plugin directory turned connecting a notes app into an install button, for some apps. Here’s how each popular notes app gets into ChatGPT in October 2026, what it can read and change, which ChatGPT plan it takes, and what to set before you click Allow.
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October 21, 2026
Evernote for genealogy in 2026: keep it, or move your research?
The guides that taught a generation of family historians to use Evernote were written for an app that no longer exists. Here’s who should stay, the real options for everyone else, a research log template, and what happened when we ran an 1860 census page through OCR and searched it.
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October 18, 2026
How to keep your Evernote note links when you move
Links between Evernote notes break in a normal export because the file never says which note is which. One flag on a free tool fixes that. Here are the commands, the import, and what does and doesn’t come across.
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October 6, 2026
How to export all your Apple Notes at once
For years the answer was ‘one note at a time, as a PDF.’ macOS 26 changed that, and most guides haven’t caught up. Here’s every way to bulk-export Apple Notes now — on a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad or a Windows PC — and what each method quietly leaves behind.
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September 27, 2026
Tag it, find it, 🎉
Harbor picked up three everyday features at once: inline tags, notebooks and tags in quick search, and emoji. Here’s what each one does, and the version you need for it.
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September 20, 2026
Harbor is on Product Hunt today
We’re on Product Hunt today, and the founder is in the comments until they go quiet. Here’s the short version of what Harbor is and isn’t, plus the questions worth asking before you move your second brain anywhere.
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September 19, 2026
We built an ENEX converter that can't upload your notes
Every ENEX converter in the search results asks you to upload your export. We think that’s a bad trade for a file full of bank statements and medical letters, so we built one with no server to upload to — and wrote the ZIP and hashing code by hand to keep anyone else’s code away from it.
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September 16, 2026
The best notes apps with an MCP server (2026)
Sixteen of the 24 notes apps we checked now ship their own MCP server, so having one isn’t the question any more. We compared what matters when you pick: whether your AI can reach it, whether it can delete, whether you can rein it in, and what you pay to get in.
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September 13, 2026
Type [[ to link a note
Linking a note used to mean stopping, going back to an empty line, and opening the slash menu. Now you type two brackets and carry on — and if the note doesn’t exist yet, the list offers to create it.
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