Apple Notes priorities manton.org

@manton Agree. As much as Apple has improved Notes in the last few years, I still hesitate to use it as my primary notes-taking app.

@manton I agree, but there's nothing that comes close for me and my wife to collaborate quickly and easily on things like grocery lists, email drafts and shared notes. But to your point, there are often times when sync simply doesn't work and it's infuriating.

@manton ProNotes adds Markdown support to Apple Notes

@bradbarrish That’s true, for sharing and editing with a couple people, Notes is pretty good. I bet it replaced Google Docs for a lot of people for shared lists, etc.

@manton This problem is exactly why I won’t use Notes for anything important. It’s just not a serious app without interoperability of any kind.

@manton I like Notes but it’s a walled garden. So I only use it for very temporary things

@manton For me, Notes exists solely as a way to let my family know what the meal plan is for the coming week. I tried using it as my actual place to keep information and I like it but that niggling feeling in the back of my head that all of this could just disappear kept me from fully committing, despite my wife and kids having zero issues with it.

@aeryn Same here on the temporary use. I occasionally use it to ask Siri to transcribe something while I’m driving, then I copy and paste it out.

@manton on a side note, the #obsidianmd team/community spent some considerable effort on an importer for other formats to Obsidian (which of course uses an open markdown file based storage natively), to enable migration from many notes platforms in. Amongst their successes is a very good Apple Notes import, which now handles a *lot* of idiosyncrasies and happens to leave you with a lovely folder full of clean separate md file per note … might be handy until Apple relent…

@manton see https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes

@craigmorgan That sounds great. Obsidian folks doing good work.

@manton I really like the "File over app" philosophy championed by Obsidian's CEO https://stephango.com/file-over-app

@jade Completely agree.

@manton As much as Obsidian touts the file over the app, the plugin ecosystem really ties you down into Obsidian as soon as you get into any advanced functionality. I moved off Obsidian because I was spending more time fiddling with plugins than getting the most out of my notes. Also, the mobile experience was never really good. And I found it strangely difficult to share notes with people. Even a basic copy and paste with formatting never really worked well. Anyway, I’d love more import/export options with Apple Notes, and for them to fix bugs around Shortcuts.

@manton like many other note taking apps, Apple Notes was never intended to be exported as a whole, it keeps users’ data locked within the ecosystem.

@bradbarrish I've had Apple Notes betray me more than once, probably because of some iCloud business. I seem to have too many Apple devices for iCloud to support. I had to laboriously export / delete / import ALL my files in order to resume sync across device.

@manton There are third party apps that can export Apple Notes, thankfully

@craigmorgan Thank you for the reminder that this exists! Obsidian is what I use instead of Notes, so I need to export the old notes I still have moldering away on iCloud.