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Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

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Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#1

Post by rexec »

This lets you talk to local LLMs in Apple Notes. I saw Obsidian Ollama (https://github.com/hinterdupfinger/obsidian-ollama) and thought it was handy, but I'm too lazy to migrate away from the Apple ecosystem, so I quickly hacked this together. I tend to use Notes as a scratchpad for prompts, so it's nice to do some quick inference without leaving the app.

Notes doesn't really support plugins so I'm using the macOS accessibility API for reading selections and then stream responses using the clipboard (not ideal but it works).

Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)
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Re: Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#2

Post by aaronbrethorst »

this looks cool. I have a request: I've been using the Notes app for my todo lists since mid-2020. I have one note per day, and I then break them up by quarter and year. e.g.:

    2024
      Q1
        Monday, January 1, 2024:
          - [x] [XYZ] - Review pull request from [Person]
          - [x] Investigate error rates for [XYZ] in Sentry
I look back through these documents for two reasons:

1. Right now, I have to go back through all of my notes from the past week for engineering sync meetings to assemble a list of completed tasks, then I group them by functional area, and then I write out a little bullet-pointed synopsis that I share with my peers.

2. I use my completed todo lists from the previous year to help fill in my annual performance evaluation. I look back through the entire year for major projects I worked on.

I'd love to speed up both of these processes by pointing an LLM at all of these documents and having it auto-summarize either on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

Re: Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#4

Post by rexec »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

this looks cool. I have a request: I've been using the Notes app for my todo lists since mid-2020. I have one note per day, and I then break them up by quarter and year. e.g.: 2024 Q1 Monday, January 1, 2024: - [x] [XYZ] - Review pull request from [Person] - [x] Investigate error rates for [XYZ] in Sentry I look back through these documents for two reasons: 1. Right now, I have to go back through all of my notes from…

Thanks! There's a "Summarize selection" prompt in there, so if you try it with a good model like Mixtral you might already get good results for (1). For (2) I'm guessing you'd want to be able to write a custom prompt?

Re: Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#6

Post by aaronbrethorst »

rexec wrote: post #4
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

this looks cool. I have a request: I've been using the Notes app for my todo lists since mid-2020. I have one note per day, and I then break them up by quarter and year. e.g.: 2024 Q1 Monday, January 1, 2024: - [x] [XYZ] - Review pull request from [Person] - [x] Investigate error rates for [XYZ] in Sentry I look back through these documents for two reasons: 1. Right now, I have to go back through all of my notes from…

Thanks! There's a "Summarize selection" prompt in there, so if you try it with a good model like Mixtral you might already get good results for (1). For (2) I'm guessing you'd want to be able to write a custom prompt?

Can "Summarize selection" work across multiple documents, or is it limited to only a single document at a time?

Also, the Notes app on macOS has a reasonably comprehensive AppleScript Dictionary associated with it for scripting; have you considered using osascript with either AppleScript (ugh) or JavaScript to expand your cross-document capabilities?

Re: Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#7

Post by jwells89 »

marcellus23 wrote: post #5

have you considered using Services for this? Services already support taking selected text and doing transformations on it, and allow user-configurable keyboard shortcuts. Plus it will work in any app, not just Notes.

Echoing this. Services and other types of macOS system plugins (e.g. color palette plugins) are great with how they enable app-agnostic functionality but are unfortunately underused.

Re: Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#8

Post by rexec »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #6
rexec wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! There's a "Summarize selection" prompt in there, so if you try it with a good model like Mixtral you might already get good results for (1). For (2) I'm guessing you'd want to be able to write a custom prompt?

Can "Summarize selection" work across multiple documents, or is it limited to only a single document at a time? Also, the Notes app on macOS has a reasonably comprehensive AppleScript Dictionary associated with it for scripting; have you considered using osascript with either AppleScript (ugh) or JavaScript to expand your cross-document capabilities?

Ah yes it's limited to single documents.

Using AppleScript/JavaScript to pull multiple notes is a good idea!

Re: Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#9

Post by rexec »

marcellus23 wrote: post #5

have you considered using Services for this? Services already support taking selected text and doing transformations on it, and allow user-configurable keyboard shortcuts. Plus it will work in any app, not just Notes.

That feature is so well hidden I kind of forgot it exist. I'll check out the selection/transformation stuff!

Re: Show HN: NotesOllama – I added local LLM support to Apple Notes (through Ollama)

#10

Post by andy_xor_andrew »

On this topic (using local LLM for analyzing local text on an iDevice) -

I highly suspect that the recent Journal app from Apple, which auto-installed via an iOS update, is intended to incentivize users to journal and write about their daily lives, so that when Apple inevitably ships a local LLM on iDevices, there is already a corpus of data for the model to RAG over and use to "understand" the user.

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