Live data from Hacker News

Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

daringfireball.net

21–30 of 229 posts

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#21

John Gruber, creator of markdown, wrong about markdown again. ( https://airsource.co.uk/blog/2014/09/04/markdown-has-been-st... )

As its author, he’s right though. There really shouldn’t be a standard considered Standard Markdown. It muddies the fact that it wasn’t published by its author. Maybe Common Markdown would have been a better name between a few large orgs.

It was briefly renamed Common Markdown as well, and John hated on that as well, so it became CommonMark.

And now we're in an odd position where Github and friends all validate their implementations against the CommonMark suites, but refer to the result as "Markdown" to their users, which makes the work they're doing maintaining that stuff especially thankless.

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#22
post #14

Markdown is the native formatting of large language models. As such, support for it will be everywhere in the coming years. I suspect LLMs, not users, have been the requesting this feature at Apple.

That's actually a nice perk since I have LLMs summarize or re-word my research findings quite often. I'm a disorganized person, so they've been a big help with me organizing my work.

I also like that Markdown is being added since it's what I typically use for documentation (github, etc). The default formatting in notes currently leaves something to be desired...

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#25

John Gruber, creator of markdown, wrong about markdown again. ( https://airsource.co.uk/blog/2014/09/04/markdown-has-been-st... )

As its author, he’s right though. There really shouldn’t be a standard considered Standard Markdown. It muddies the fact that it wasn’t published by its author. Maybe Common Markdown would have been a better name between a few large orgs.

The thing he’s wrong about is not the name, it’s that markdown doesn’t need a standard. Markdown absolutely needed a spec, and gruber resisted that which is why the spec was done without him and has to be confusingly called CommonMark instead of just being markdown.

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#29
Kinda stoked for this. Been working on a notes app and apple notes is my current daily driver. Apple notes stores the notes in a proprietary and opaque format atm. I’ve been scheming ways to break the notes out without luck. Now I can just wait for this feature to come out.

Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts

#30
post #8

It makes sense that Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it. As an aside, I have a dream that Apple Notes could be piped into a website as a form of blogging. As it is, I haven't found a way to do it...

I like my Markdown notes editor, but I agree it's not the right choice for Apple notes because exposing the underlying machinery in everyday use is not Apple's style.

It does feel like a good option for export though (as John says in the post).
Post reply on HN