My Notes on Apple Math Notes
mlajtos.mu
mlajtos.mu
Some things aren’t obvious until we see them. This is one.
Why do I need a second copy on top of the one I just wrote?
I don’t think misinterpretation would happy nearly enough for it to be more useful than intrusive.
I briefly experimented with that in 2022 (nothing published though) and it worked pretty well. However, the implementation has to be good – you can't just beautify every symbol because it becomes distracting really fast. The less confidence system has about some symbol, the more it should fix it. High-confidence misclassifications will still be a theoretical problem, but I didn't experienced them that often.
Like, why would I care about the value of `a` before I've finished writing the equation? Sometimes a tool just shutting the hell up is a good thing.
Lots of people like autocomplete and animations.
I hope you’re not this miserable and rude in real life.
How about “complaints about” syntax errors after you’ve finished writing?
Jokes aside, to answer why knowing the value of ‘a’ might be useful before writing the full equation: ever work in excel and you’re building up a calculation, and when finished, your answer isn’t what you expected? Tracing that missing parentheses or brain-fart typo can be frustrating. I imagine that’s the same reason why some people would care about the value of ‘a’ before they’ve finished.
Vargas Llosa 727-516=211
I’d forgotten about math notes / assumed it only applied to handwritten notes so the first time I updated one of these notes after updating my iOS it was a little shocking to retype the = and have the difference generated automatically instead of having to figure it out on my own. I’ve been holding off updating my Macs, but I can see this feature being really handy as a sort of lite spreadsheet replacement.
I don't really care for the suggestion that 2 + 2 = 4, I'd rather the app be responsive on open.
You can also run `mdutil -E`.
I miss Steve Jobs, he would get the team back on track and drive the field forward more quickly by demanding reasonable UIs.
there is no way to default it to off, which I have seen some people request.
239.12
+242.33
+673.34
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=
And get an answer after the equals sign? (a la Soulver) Isn't this an obvious use case? Was Apple trying really hard not to copy Soulver's implementation?
You can type them one after another on the same line and get an answer, but that's bad for readability. I want to add up numbers in a column like Soulver and a spreadsheet lets you do, and do that inside Notes.
Linear algebra, calculus notation, etc. these are necessary improvements. I think they might come in the future though, I know this will become on par with a graphic calculator.
I looked up the paper on this, but there are no good models for it that generate proper syntax. So for one thing, whoever does this would need to grind out creating at minimum a few 10,000 math exercises, to get the software to work.
So this costs, say, ~400.000 USD, and 2 years of time, counting taxes, equipment, office, ... Perhaps "only" 100.000 if you're a professor and willing to use a PhD student (and deal with the issues that will give).
Now I don't mean to disparage this proposal. But this seems to be how everything works except "improve our existing boring software 1%" ... And it's frustrating. At best, I can find machine learning jobs that boil down to "make LLMs solve tickets" or, worse "make LLMs write spam" (usually customize/personalize existing spam mails). Beats solving tickets myself, that it definitely does, but something like this ...
I don't have trouble finding software development jobs. However, I cannot ever seem to do something like this. I would so love to make something like this, to really take a hard problem, work it and make something beautiful. But this is not a hobby effort. This requires spending a few years of effort making something beautiful.
If this is done as a hobby project I can make a nice tech demo, no doubt, but it will be only what I make of it, and it'll be a limited cool tech demo, just like what Apple did (making a gradio that does a few examples correctly isn't very hard), what I'd use it for. Not because I don't want to make the next generation of advanced calculators, but because I'd never have the time to do that.
I don't think Apple did a "cool tech demo". In my view, they published first version of a very ambitious project. They worked on it for years with top talent. And they felt this is the minimum lovable product on which they will iterate.
And if you would like to build product-ready solution similar to Math Notes, you can leverage existing stuff. MyScript.com have really good handwriting recognition system with bells and whistles. You can take a lot of shortcuts.
And it's just a general observation. Being well paid to make a technically impressive GOOD product for people, I would so love to be in that situation. But barring a FANG job, I don't know what to do.
This handwriting is not awful, so no surprise it's recognized well
But the bad feedback criticism is spot on, though the better solution is to replace symbols in-place, why would you prefer your "awful handwriting" to beautiful math symbols with excellent legibility?
(and btw, pemdas forgot implied multiplication)
You mean it should replace your handwriting with typed symbols?
I prefer to keep my handwriting over the printed symbols. This might sound crazy, but when I see my handwriting transform into printed symbols, I feel as if the system stole it from me. :) Another crazy take – it is more difficult to read handwritten script, so you slow down your thinking, which might help you to think more deeply. I can't back these claims with any evidence other than "I like it that way"..
An example with non-representative numbers:
A = 10000 W
B = A / 1 kW =
(the quote at the bottom of the article is excellent and apt, too :))
(I love that quote.)
It's just not that good at recognizing my handwriting, and best I can tell has zero mechanism for teaching it to better understand.
When enabling the "autocorrect" where it cleans up your writing, it so often replaces my handwriting with the entirely wrong word as to be infuriating. On top of that, it often does so long after I wrote it so I might not even notice that it happened until I try to read the note back later.
As the author mentioned, having to switching to eraser and back is painful and annoying. I really wish the options for reflowing a document were a lot more intuitive. If I need to go back and add a sentence or two mid note I can try to draw a line to make space but it rarely works like one would expect.
I think all in all the feature is neat but half baked, and they really need to do a bunch more user testing to get it into something that you would want to use rather than a neat tech demo.
I don’t know if I’m explaining it well. It was shown in the original demo of math notes during WWDC.
If you open the calculator app and go to handwritten calculations (whatever they're called), you have all that cool stuff. But if you open Notes, you have to click "Insert result" every single time, for better or for worse.
Also about UX improvements: lmao. There is still no way to add a new line with Scribble, or sanely write in a small text box (I guess, it's only in third-party applications I have had this issue).