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

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211–220 of 229 posts

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

#211
post #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.

Maybe you could try these: Export notes by folder: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/3aed9f1608ce4efeb31a276ad02... Export all notes: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1b305195692e42c19d258989475... Notes to html: https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/1a61fe549b7c41d7b2e3511ee12...

Oh cool, thanks!!! I’ve heard of other people getting good value out of Shortcuts. Now I can give it a shot.

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

#212
post #202
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. For me, the popularity of Markdown on (pre-Microsoft) GitHub and GitLab was all I needed, to declare that the company wiki, code-embedded API docs, and anything else appropriate should just use Markdown. Markdown is good enough for most of the documentation that software engineers do (other than diagrams), they already have to know it, and I don't want yet-another-markup-language to be a barrier to capturing…

> other than diagrams Works fine with some help https://mermaid.live/ https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

No, mermaid is not fine. You don't have fine control over layout and composition, you can't place your own media and annotations where you like, you can't even use the correct icons for things like databases and cloud services. I usually go into Figma for anything more complex than about 7 entities or if I need to tell a story with composition.

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

#214
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than diagrams Works fine with some help https://mermaid.live/ https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

No, mermaid is not fine. You don't have fine control over layout and composition, you can't place your own media and annotations where you like, you can't even use the correct icons for things like databases and cloud services. I usually go into Figma for anything more complex than about 7 entities or if I need to tell a story with composition.

I agree. I use markdown a lot and was trying to use Mermaid for diagrams in it and it was frustrating. Among the biggest issues I ran into was that text was constantly cut off or covered up.

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

#216
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than diagrams Works fine with some help https://mermaid.live/ https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...

No, mermaid is not fine. You don't have fine control over layout and composition, you can't place your own media and annotations where you like, you can't even use the correct icons for things like databases and cloud services. I usually go into Figma for anything more complex than about 7 entities or if I need to tell a story with composition.

A mix plantuml for constrained no-frills diffable standard diagrams and yEd for actual manual placement and boxes-and-arrows drawing - local editing, both can be scripted to export to an image format - is a good local optimum. I haven't found a much better combination for years.

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

#217
post #41

When 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…

Markdown is like the new WordPerfect for some people, who want expressive written paths to format text. Like with WordPerfect, there are people who get great utility (attorneys in WP, developers with Markdown), but 80-95% of people don’t get anything out of it. It’s also one of those things where the constraints are an advantage. Markdown is great for internet facing text content, while many aspects of the mainstream…

Everyone gets something out of markdown, even the 80-95% of document writers that don't get what they want out of it for writing don't have to read as much slop from the others in their group.

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

#218
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can embed html inside markdown

But at what price?

very high, usually, equivalent of dagnerouslySetInnerHtml on react if not handled/escaped/sanitized and taking user inputs

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

#219
post #143

I'm still mad Apple Notes became unusable for me at some point due to iCloud fucking it up it has thousands of thousands of unrelated files in the notes db. The app just crashes mostly or is super-slow unusable Apple used to be UX king, now its a joke.

> Apple used to be UX king

Was this before or after the spinning beach balls?

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

#220
post #41

When 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…

Markdown was here before the other (currently) big formats and will be here after them. It's not perfect, but at least I don't need to worry about it disappearing on me like every other piece of tech and software I own.
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