Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcdow | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Was also in your boat, but realized there are various tools to export Apple notes as markdown that work reasonably well; Obsidian itself recommends one[1]. Meanwhile, I'm impressed that Apple notes keeps getting better. It was _almost_ good enough for me to abandon my own note taking app. The things that slowly drove me nuts were lack of real code formatting and lack of image formatting (after they added note linking and tagging, the prior issues I had). I'm still surprised how long it takes most notes apps to get decent out of the box image formatting; few would want to drop an image onto their note and have it blown up to take up the full page by default. Just make your notes app look like the typical blog by default and _most_ people will love it[2].

[1]: https://help.obsidian.md/import/apple-notes. [2]: tbf it took me quite a bit of work to get there in my own app, and its still got bugs

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.

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.

> Why keep using Notes if if it hurts you so much that they're not markdown-exportable?

Among other reasons, because the sync experience is second to none.

Some of the other reasons:

- Apple Pencil

- Shared notes with friends and family (vacation planning, lists, etc)

So first of all, I like Apple notes for its simplicity and ability to sync with iCloud. I don't really care if it's exportable using markdown, I only really care that it is exportable. Because I'd like to migrate to the notes app I am working on.

I have had flawless success converting screenshots into formatted text with llms

Reply on news.ycombinator.com