Why do all these people like taking notes? I recommend a very simple process, which is to delete them and just remember everything.
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Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
171–180 of 229 posts
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#172[flagged]
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Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#173He's right: Markdown was built for web editing in an era where physical keyboards outnumbered virtual ones. It doesn't really make sense for Notes outside of export. There's little benefit to it as an input system on iOS/iPadOS (likely the dominant platforms for Notes) where formatting menus are just as close as `#` and `_` characters. Several Markdown rules wouldn't make sense in the context of Notes. e.g. "end a li…
Do iOS devices still default to translating consecutive spaces into “. “ within a few seconds? Always used to be a bother when authoring md content on an iPad.
That can be disabled [0] (and I feel like has been on option for many years now).
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#174Markdown 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.
Shortcuts has Rich Text -> Markdown and Markdown -> Rich Text actions.
I made a couple quick shortcuts to go both ways, with the clipboard as both the input and output. I put a widget for this on my desktop and it makes it pretty easy. Not as easy as native support, but not bad.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#175It 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...
That was my dream once upon a time. I put my blood, sweat, and tears into making it happen. Check out my indie product: https://quotion.co
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#176Kinda 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.
I have had flawless success converting screenshots into formatted text with llms
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, but that’s the tension. There’s no free lunch. On the flip, that user wants the complex features of the platform, and exposing them to a markup language takes elegant markdown and turns it into html or ooxml.
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It reads nothing like ChatGPT, the "on the flip" is a dead giveaway that it isn't. Strange comment.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#178The biggest thing that excites me about this is the fact that other Apple Notes export formats absolutely suck at the moment. You have PDF, and Pages. One's not editable, the other is a proprietary format that will lose formatting if converted to ODF or Word and is clunky in general.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs It helps that Jekyll, one such static blog, was also pushed by GitHub back in the day.
Was Jekyll ever that popular though?
I can’t provide usage numbers, but it used to be the happy path for using GitHub Pages. I suppose static site generation was fairly niche so “popular” may not be the right word. I think Jekyll was a big fish in a little pond, however.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#180When Gruber mentions that he never uses Markdown outside of his blog, and hinting at the fact that it was not intended for text editors (and other apps), there's one important point I want to make. Yes, Markdown has disadvantages, and a few rough edges for uses as the format for editors et al, but there are two very big advantages and/or sideffects of it's widespread use: (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as…
Another nice thing about markdown is that you can pick up the formatting even if reading the markdown in plaintext.
So lists look exactly how you would expect lists to look like if you were writing it on a piece of paper.
Italic/Bolds are surrounded by /* which convey emphasis even in plaintext.
Headings prefixed by # is a reasonable way to depict headings in plaintext and convey the intention immediately even if you don't know Markdown.