Having had past issues with syncing Apple Notes (~2 years ago) I’ve been watching things closely given that I’ve defaulted to using Apple Notes for nearly all note-taking. Today I reached 1,000 notes, many of which have attached PDFs or images. Thus far🤞🏼syncing has been fast and flawless.
I realize 1,000 notes is not a lot in the scheme of things, but it is a milestone of sorts. I’ll certainly update the forum should things change.
I’m sharing this in case it helps those on the fence about using AN because of concerns over syncing. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
If I could embed code snippets in Apple Notes I’d be all in. Unfortunatly rich text tends to do bad things to code, like swap out quote marks for curly quotes, and double-dash for em dash, that sort of thing. It’s appreciated when writing prose, not so great if you are trying to remember that 14-line aws command you need to run.
I have just shy of 2,000 (1,912 to be precise) and my experience has been just as seamless. This is notable for me, too, because a few years ago I spent countless hours with Apple tech support trying to figure out why my notes were not syncing correctly. It has been hassle free ever since. I never have to think about the status of syncing any more. Very pleasing experience. So much so, that my wife and I have been using a ton of shared notes for all sorts of things we have to plan–that is saying something, too, because she has zero tolerance for anything that’s, for a lack of a better term, fiddly.
I do wish there could be some plain text selector for Notes because reformatting rich text is a pain, and it would be such a good option to have in Notes. Maybe on a per-note basis you could toggle a switch like you can do when composing an e-mail.
At the top of each note is metadata showing the creation date. When you click that date, it toggles to the last edited date and vice versa. Also, the note in the sidebar shows the last date/time edited.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the Apple default apps are more capable than most realize–the problem is that Apple has a bad habit of “hiding” features. With iOS 16/Ventura, they will be even better.
I agree. I would consider defaulting to Obsidian because everything being equal, I’d prefer my notes in plain text, on my computer, with the ability to easily apply back linking. Two things are holding me back from using Obsidian as my default notes app:
The clunkiness of creating tables, which I sometimes need for my notes (though admittedly, not often).
The inability to easily send a task from a meeting note to Reminders. I want to be able to highlight the todo, share it with Reminders and have it show up in Reminders with a link back to Obsidian. I haven’t found a good way to accomplish this yet. I’d even “consider” going back to OmniFocus or Things if I could figure out how to do this. That said, I worry about plugins breaking thus leaving my workflow broken.
Agree re the clunky table comment: I tend to use TableFlip to create these, and paste in the code.
On tasks, yes it’s a constant search for the best way to do this in Obsidian, but currently I’m using the plugin you mention - works well, and looks like this in both apps:
@Tony59 but when I go there, I see this: "This project is currently unsupported. Please feel free to fork " Is this a situation where a plugin is no longer supported and therefore may not work in the future? If so, this is precisely my concern.
I agree back linking would be great (I don’t think it helps my workflow, and probably just slows me down).
I wish iOS/iPadOS allowed pasting and formatting of links on apple notes like the desktop does (specifically I started using devonthink for everything bucket and since it is so easy to link to the file. On Mac the link shows up in apple notes as “file name” with the link to the devonthink://… On iOS devices even with ios16 beta when you post the link into apple notes it shows as the “devonthink://…” rather than the file name.). This is the feature that would get me back to apple notes and away from obsidian. I really do think obsidian is horribly ugly to look at and not practical for the amount of work it takes to get it functional for day to day non-academic use.
Yes has always bothered me. There is a workaround but it is a bit strange. Here are the steps:
Paste the URL into a note
Move the cursor to the end of the link
Type the link name, e.g., “click here”
Delete all of the preceding text EXCEPT THE TEXT YOU JUST TYPED
" Is this a situation where a plugin is no longer supported and therefore may not work in the future? If so, this is precisely my concern.
