On iPad, opening the floating Quick Notes window from control center or a bottom-right corner swipe is very convenient - a small Notes window opens, with all of the notes in your “Quick Notes” folder available by swiping left or right (like a system-level floating Tot window). It is great for jotting quick thoughts tied to an ebook or podcast or what have you.
I am almost sure this floating window used to exist on iPhone, but if it did, recently I cannot figure out how to trigger it in the same way. Opening a quick note from the control center only brings up the “New Quick Note” interface, and only sometimes am I prompted to add the app link. No returning to existing notes, or floating window.
Did this iPhone feature go away? Or am I misremembering that it ever existed? Are my Notes app settings configured in such a way that this is somehow turned off? None of my fiddling has helped.
Notes has pretty good Shortcuts support so I’m sure you’d be able to fashion something near to what you are after. Assign to Action button, double/triple tap back of iPhone etc.
Swipe? Or do you mean Pencil swipe? I know it can be done with the Pencil, but can it be done with a finger? I’m just in the process of checking out whether I will get into using QuickNotes and I tried and could not invoke it on iPad without the Pencil.
Thanks! No wonder I didn’t think it was possible. I even had to read that page several times before I saw the super secret setting under the sentence that said you had to use the Apple Pencil.
I also saw something else in that screen — I’ve turned off windowing because I never use it. At least, never intentionally.
I don’t think it ever existed because the iPhone screen is too small. As the videos show below, it is an iPad only feature. Control center is the way to go, one extra tap, but still pretty convenient.
I don’t mind too much using the control center to access quick notes, or the fact that it takes over the screen… but as far as I can tell, that control always opens a NEW quick note (from what I can tell), not the swipe-able list of all my current quick notes.
On my phone, I have two shortcuts in Control Center. One opens a note that I can write in, and the other does the same, but by clicking back, I can get a list of all of my quick notes. It’s not elegant, but it works on the phone. That said, I use quick notes primarily on my Mac and iPad. When on the phone, I capture notes primarily through dictation.
I am seeing this setting for notes: “Suggest Notes with App Links” - which to me would imply that there is a way to re-access existing quick notes within the context of another app.
I’ve been experimenting and it seems that the Notes Quick Note widget on iPad and iOS always reopens the most recently used Quick Note. On the Mac, the Hot Corner trigger behaves the same way.
That effectively lets me treat a single Quick Note as a rolling “day note”. I can surface it instantly from my iPhone, iPad, or Mac and carry on where I left off. In practice, this has turned Quick Notes into a lightweight, cross-device daily workspace - and it’s working very well.
The “Suggest Notes with App Links” works by surfacing a Note that has a link to a page in Safari. So if you open that link in Safari, a window shows up in the lower right of your iPad screen which has that particular Note with the Safari link.
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