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iOS 18 Notes App: All the New Features

macfacts said:
Why type/write all that out, most people can mentally do all that with a calculator, so gimmicky.
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It's not about the raw calculation as much as mental planning, where a numbered calculator isn't enough. Historically people might write out a plan like this in a similar fashion to how it's been done in the Notes example here, but I guess now people will have a digital copy of their plan/idea and the system will handle the calculation part and I guess will be less likely to make an error over people calculating such a plan mentally. Handy way to track and make changes later. Turns out the kayaks are gone up in price? you get the idea.
 
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Mac Fly (film) said:
It's not about the raw calculation as much as mental planning, where a numbered calculator isn't enough. Historically people might write out a plan like this in a similar fashion to how it's been done in the Notes example here, but I guess now people will have a digital copy of their plan/idea and the system will handle the calculation part and I guess will be less likely to make an error over people calculating such a plan mentally. Handy way to track and make changes later. Turns out the kayaks are gone up in price? you get the idea.
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Juli, please bounce your ideas around in the forums and interact with people. Interacting is how it’s done now.
 
altaic said:
Juli, please bounce your ideas around in the forums and interact with people. Interacting is how it’s done now.
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Help me understand the motivation for your particular reply and how it relates to Juli consulting with us. The example in the article is someone planning a trip which would be helped historically by taking notes and ideas on paper, and then computers and now phones (and tablets). Some of these new Notes tools will help users in this regard. Calculators will continue to be used widely and especially for quick momentary calculations. These calculation tools built into apps like Notes serve another purpose and aid with planning and list making where one can visually see their idea or plan mapped out in text form with editable calculations.
 
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They buried the lede. Apple writing tools (Apple Intelligence) will be the most useful feature for me in the new Notes app. LLMs can do all kinds of crazy stuff, but proofreading and language revisions should be the most fundamental tasks. I will use this a lot if it works well. And if it doesn't go subscription-based.
 
I’ve been an Apple user, ever since I got my 2008 24” iMac.

The new updates intrigue me more than ever before.

Apple has put a lot into this, and I look forward to next month.
 
sputnikBA said:
Tbh I didn’t try it because I expected the three iPhones & phone UI to throw the recognition off but thank you for your help!
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Of course you have to crop out the UI, but that's like ten seconds in the screenshot tool or in Photos.
 
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The Cockney Rebel said:
I’ve been an Apple user, ever since I got my 2008 24” iMac.

The new updates intrigue me more than ever before.

Apple has put a lot into this, and I look forward to next month.
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What could possibly go wrong 😉

tempImageEZ0UfS.jpg


Apple summary:

IBSCsll.jpeg
 
Smart Script doesn't change your handwriting, but it makes it smoother, straighter, and easier to read.
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For their next trick I hear they don’t change the colour but they make it more red.
 
All for improving Notes—As long as they keep it SIMPLE. To me that’s it‘s strongest quality. I don’t want them to clog up the UI with massive amounts of options, and Doo Dads, and a lot of other distracting nonsense. Personally, I would have had them put more effort into having better organization options, and maybe better search possibilities. I also think it would be nice to be able to draw and write with the same tool in the same area (say on iPad using the pencil), rather than have to have distinct drawing areas and then text areas—sometimes I just want to MOVE and create fast without stopping to choose the tools or organize things as I go. I think they could also improve the ability to read handwriting. For example, Notes saw this:

1724644027970.png



and read it as 1412=16

So, IMO, good but not great
 
mazz0 said:
But you implied it was wrong didn’t you? Or did I misunderstand?
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Someone posted about it on Reddit showing how wrong it can summarise. I think bubs may be a nickname for someone. Siri or Apple Intel interpreted both sentences combined to mean someone was pregnant which the recipient said nearly gave them a heart attack.
 
The Loaf said:
I also think it would be nice to be able to draw and write with the same tool in the same area (say on iPad using the pencil), rather than have to have distinct drawing areas and then text areas—sometimes I just want to MOVE and create fast without stopping to choose the tools or organize things as I go.
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I too would prefer.
 
Can you use ‘x’?
So item = 16
item + x = 18
x = (will it say 2?)

I don’t think that works…? Or does it? seems like an easy addition
 
Mac Fly (film) said:
Someone posted about it on Reddit showing how wrong it can summarise. I think bubs may be a nickname for someone. Siri or Apple Intel interpreted both sentences combined to mean someone was pregnant which the recipient said nearly gave them a heart attack.
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Aah!

I look forward to it! Well actually I've already got it, I'm using the MacOS 15 beta, I should say I look forward to it hitting a wide audience and humorous occurrences popping up! :D
 
NervousFish2 said:
With these changes, I think I am finally ready to move to Notes from Evernote. The only thing that would be holding me back at this stage is the inability to do web clipping. Evernotes web-clipper isn't perfect, but it does the job. It recognizes headers, etc. Whereas Apple Notes is still based on cut and paste, so if you want to put whole articles into your "notes" and mark them up, etc., you have some extra work to do.

Does anyone have any ideas as to possible workarounds for this, using Apple Notes? Like, say, something like a Shortcut to port the Safari reader view version of an article over to Notes?
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How far you like to clip the web?

Shared a webpage from safari to note would give you a thumbnail of previewing the page.

Yes, for marking up and off line reading, you may export a reader mode pdf of a web page from safari.

For clipping, you may wait to see how AI delivers a summary of a web page.
 
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timeislove said:
How far you like to clip the web?

Shared a webpage from safari to note would give you a thumbnail of previewing the page.

Yes, for marking up and off line reading, you may export a reader mode pdf of a web page from safari.

For clipping, you may wait to see how AI delivers a summary of a web page.
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Thanks. Have been playing around with it. So far so good. It's a very different experience. More minimalist. But I'm thinking maybe it's actually better!
 
Just a couple of very quick notes, in case anyone was interested. I have tried to make Apple Notes work instead of Evernote. This involved a lengthy process of exporting 5,000 notes or so, from Evernote, and importing them into Apple Notes. I did this by exporting folders at a time, as there was no real way to export notebooks.

  1. First thing to say is that Apple Notes choked hard. I have an iPad Pro M1, M3 MacBook Pro (32GB), and iPhone 16 Pro Max. All three devices slowed down dramatically. I even played around with it on a new M4 iPad Pro. It also struggled. My theory is that there was legacy stuff in the Evernote notes that Apple Notes simply isn't designed to be able to index.
  2. Second thing to say is that cleaning the Evernote notes out of Apple Notes has been a real chore. There was about 15 years of notes in Evernote. I dealt wish I had thought to tag them all before I exported, so it would have been easy to identify them and clean them out. I've been working on this on and off for a few days now and still not sure I have them all. Thankfully Apple Notes has speeded up again so it's not impossible to use anymore. But I have a feeling I'll be trying to find and delete them for some time to come.
  3. A real limitation of Apple Notes, I have learned, is that you can't search within a folder. Or maybe there is some way to do it, but I can't fathom how? But if I am right, it honestly seems like a crazy limitation! All these articles and YouTubes online saying how great Apple Notes is but, without a feature this simple, Apple Notes just isn't viable for the kind of projects I want to work on.
  4. I was able to pick up a cheap Evernote sub at Thanksgiving. My main reason for wanting to leave it was the big price hikes. I've been with Evernote since 2008. I felt my loyalty was being scoffed at by the new owners. it also seemed like they wee putting in a lot of "fancy" features nobody was asking for, and ignoring some things that needed to be fixed.
Overall, I think Apple Notes has come far, for what is a "free app." I like the new highlighting, the tagging, and the heading implementation. It's also great for handwritten notes. But it is by no means a Pro app. It still feels a lot like the early days of Pages.

If they can stabilize it, I'll be happy to give it another go. But given how long the app has been around now, I suspect they aren't even thinking of users like me in the design. So I suspect I will be relying on Evernote for the foreseeable future.
 
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The problem I have with Apple’s approach to treating folders as filters is that it’s extremely hard to organize.

What I need is a filter that represents “not in folder yet”. This way I can see a list of notes that yet have to be placed in a ‘folder’.

In Notes the omission of this very simple thing annoys me on a daily basis.
 
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