The Harbor blog
Building a second brain you can trust.
Notes from the team building Harbor — in public, in writing, and in plain English.
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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September 6, 2026
Should you encrypt your notes? The honest trade-offs
Every encrypted-notes pitch skips the bill. A note your app genuinely can’t read is a note it can’t search, can’t OCR and can’t hand to your AI. We checked what five notes apps encrypt by default, and what each one gives up to do it.
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September 3, 2026
We handed the books to an agent
Hours of monthly bookkeeping, done on a schedule by an agent, with the finished statement filed into Harbor as a note. Why a note beats a spreadsheet for this, and why the boring guardrails matter more than the AI.
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September 2, 2026
Evernote Web Clipper alternatives: what actually replaces it
The clipper is the thing Evernote users are most afraid of losing. We checked which notes apps ship a first-party clipper in 2026, what each actually captures, and — the part nobody covers — what happens to the thousands of clips already in your account.
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September 2, 2026
MCP servers for notes, explained
MCP is the standard that lets ChatGPT or Claude reach into your notes app. We went through the major ones to see who ships a server, who leaves it to volunteers, and who puts it behind a paid plan.
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August 30, 2026
What is an ENEX file? Evernote's export format, explained
ENEX is the file Evernote gives you when you export. We opened real exports and read the current spec: what each part holds, how to open one without Evernote, why a small notebook becomes a huge file, and what the format cannot carry.
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August 29, 2026
Your notes were always yours. Now they're Markdown too.
Markdown export is here: a folder per notebook, one .md per note, attachments alongside, and frontmatter that carries your tags and dates. The interesting part isn’t the export — it’s that Harbor reads it back in.
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August 27, 2026
Work over here, life over there
Harbor now has workspaces: group notebooks into views, flip between them, and the sidebar, search, tasks, tags and trash all follow. It’s a filter over what you see — and we’re clear about what it isn’t.
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August 25, 2026
Is Evernote still worth it in 2026? An honest review
Evernote in 2026 is a good product with a hard commercial edge: the entry plan caps you at 1,000 notes, and the uncapped one is $249.99 a year. We counted 500 recent reviews to find out who is still happy with it — and who is not.
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