Obsidian user here. BUT I also have a lot of stuff in Apple Notes. Have wanted to consolidate but always seemed to much of a chore. This is awesome for my use case. Kudos to Apple for adding this!
Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
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Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#62Kinda 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.
Why keep using Notes if if it hurts you so much that they're not markdown-exportable?
I haven't used Notes in decades other than to type out junk/numbers once every 4 months.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, there's this: https://commonmark.org But everyone seems to have their own slightly different flavor, either pre- or post- that "standardization".
Notably, Github's superset:
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And then there is GFM (Github Flavoured Markdown), which is a bit different from Common Mark.
At the time of the SM/CM/CommonMark kerfuffle a decade ago, Gruber was quite explicit that "X Flavored Markdown" was perfectly fine with him— Atwood even includes the relevant podcast snippet:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
Honestly the whole thing is so ridiculous.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#65I’d love to see Markdown added to Apple Messages. I’m constantly sending URLs to people, like https://somesite.com/login . The point of these links is usually that people read them and understand them. But the automatic behavior is to replace the text with OpenGraph links, big obnoxious bubbles of graphics, which distort or destroy the meaning that I’m trying to convey. Given the opportunity, I would send most links…
For those who don't know, you can tap on the link preview graphic and select "Convert to Text Link" to switch back to clickable text. As you mention there's no way to change the automatic behavior but at least it is possible to switch back to text links on a case-by-case basis.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#66I’d love to see Markdown added to Apple Messages. I’m constantly sending URLs to people, like https://somesite.com/login . The point of these links is usually that people read them and understand them. But the automatic behavior is to replace the text with OpenGraph links, big obnoxious bubbles of graphics, which distort or destroy the meaning that I’m trying to convey. Given the opportunity, I would send most links…
For those who don't know, you can tap on the link preview graphic and select "Convert to Text Link" to switch back to clickable text. As you mention there's no way to change the automatic behavior but at least it is possible to switch back to text links on a case-by-case basis.
THANK YOU
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#67I’d love to see Markdown added to Apple Messages. I’m constantly sending URLs to people, like https://somesite.com/login . The point of these links is usually that people read them and understand them. But the automatic behavior is to replace the text with OpenGraph links, big obnoxious bubbles of graphics, which distort or destroy the meaning that I’m trying to convey. Given the opportunity, I would send most links…
Instead of Markdown, add support for editing links with text, like word processors have.
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#68It 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...
"Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it." As someone who enjoys note-taking in Obsidian (by far my favorite super-powered markdown editor), I respectfully disagree with the premise and conclusion. On the contrary, IME, MD isn't single-purpose, and it absolutely can and does serve as a first-rate format for note-taking.
I'm not trying to take Obsidian away from you...but I'm also not trying to sign my Grandma up for Obsidian :D
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself. Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to w…
Don't overlook Reddit as a major reason for many otherwise-non-technical people to learn Markdown.
It is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).
Re: Apple Notes Will Gain Markdown Export at WWDC, and, I Have Thoughts
#70100% agree with the sentimment. markdown is hell as a format for editors :D
the effort it takes to serialize and parse markdown into an AST that rich text editor frameworks reliably operate on takes months. been there, done that. the majority of the engineering effort of building a markdown editor in the browser went into parsing and serializing markdown :/
Anyhow, we took the learnings from the Markdown editor app and created "zettel" as a result: https://github.com/opral/monorepo/tree/main/packages/zettel/.... The goal is to have an interoperable rich text AST—basically Markdown but with an AST spec.