If you read MacStories, you might have caught John’s Finalist 1.0 review a few years back. A lot has changed since: version 4.0 is out this week, its biggest update yet. Finalist is a paper-inspired daily planner for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and now Apple Watch, giving you one place to plan your day, week and month. It wrangles all your stuff into one cohesive system to help you stay on top of it all: Reminders, Calendars, habits, tasks, notes, weather, and lots more.

New in 4.0 are Notes. Write native notes that sync to your iCloud, or point Finalist at a folder of markdown files and it round-trips cleanly with Obsidian vaults, GitHub, or any editor you like. Markdown tasks inside those files show up in your timelines as real tasks, on the right date, with the right tags. There are even timeline swimlanes per tag, to visualize any endeavour.

The Watch app is also new and it extends Finalist to your wrist. Its Now card answers the day’s current question: your first moves in the morning, the running time block with a countdown, an evening wrap-up with streaks to protect. It has some very nifty complications and a Smart Stack widget.

Or take a look at Broadsheet, a newsprint-inspired layout that shines on big screens. It has delightful touches throughout: tap a World Clock and the whole page retunes to another city, with date, weather, tasks, and appointments all in that timezone. The Timeline tab lets you sketch your day in pencil. Perfect for timeblocking, especially with Pencil Pro and its squeeze menu.

Apple has featured Finalist as App of the Day multiple times, and a large Discord community drives it forward. To help you try it, MacStories readers get 50% off their first year with code MACSTORIES40.

Our thanks to Finalist for sponsoring MacStories this week.