In the early days, Apple Notes were an okay way to jot down a thought, but Apple has put a lot of work into making them much more useful. Nowadays, I hear people on tech podcasts and in my nerd circles talking about how much they use and like Apple Notes. But I don’t get it. I find myself constantly frustrated by Apple Notes. I’m going to wander through the interface to tell you what I think works well and what makes Notes feel like sandpaper on my eyeballs.
Syncs Everywhere
Probably the nicest thing I can say about Apple Notes is that the data syncs flawlessly through iCloud. I can depend on anything I write in a note on my Mac to show up instantly on my iPhone and iPad. To be fair though, iCloud syncing with a lot of note-type apps works pretty flawlessly.
Organization
Let’s talk about organization.
I also like how with Apple Notes I can pin notes to the top, allowing me to have quick access to critical notes like the one my daughter and daughter-in-law and I collaborate on to see where we are in Grey’s Anatomy so we don’t do spoilers to each other. Pinning works well to not have to scroll around through my 1058 notes or use search.
They implemented folders a while back, along with smart folders and they seem to work reasonably well. I have a smart folder for pinned and one entitled Unpinme, which are leftovers from a catastrophic experiment pinning notes. I don’t remember how long ago it was, but I tried to pin several notes and didn’t notice I had selected all notes when I hit the pin button. Unpinning them was quite a trial because I didn’t want to unpin all, I just wanted to maintain the ones I had pinned. I used smart folders to help me triage my way back to where I started.
You can tell I only use Apple Notes for things I don’t care about by the fact that I have very few folders set up in the app.
Another organization tool I don’t use much is tags. I have three tags in the left sidebar. I have one called #D627297837, one that says someone’s name with a hash in front of it, and a third one that says All Tags. When I was writing this up, I was very curious how they got there. I studied the user interface in tags and I couldn’t even figure out how to create a tag. There’s no “new tag” or “assign tag” or “create tag” or a nice plus button down in the tag area.
I’m a big fan of the app Bear for my notes. In bear, if anywhere in a note you type a hash mark (aka octothorp aka pound symbol) followed by a word, it will create what looks like a folder in the sidebar. I tried that in Apple Notes, and sure enough, that’s exactly how it works there too. I guess Bear did a better job of onboarding me when I was learning it than Apple Notes.
Armed with this new revelation, I selected the tag #D627297837, which revealed a note containing a ticket number from an Apple repair I had done recently.
I didn’t want that to be a tag. In a lot of apps, you can stop them from interpreting symbols by typing a backslash () before the symbol. This is called “escaping”. In Notes, I tried to put the backslash before the hash, but it didn’t stop it from being a tag. I thought I would just put a space between the hash and the number to remove its taggy behavior, but Apple Notes simply would not let me put my cursor in between. I tried clicking, and even by using the arrow keys to go back and forth but it would not let me get between the hash and the next character. That tag was now a single entity. I put my cursor ahead of the hash and did a forward delete to see if I could just remove the hash, but instead, Apple Notes deleted the entire ticket number. And guess what else? Undo would not bring it back. I had permanently lost that ticket number.
But wait! I typed it into this very blog post while I was figuring this out so I was able to put it back! Why on earth would Notes make a deletion be undoable? I tested this later and I was able to undo the deletion of a tag in a Note, but now I’m very nervous about them.
I created a new tag called #Software. I thought it would be easy to command-select several software-related notes and simply drag them onto my shiny new #Software tag. I was able to command-select, and I was able to simply drag them onto the tag. When I was dragging, it even showed me how many notes I was dragging in a little red box, but when I let go, only the last selected note was assigned the tag.
Now that I know how tags work, it’s not a terrible system, but it’s dodgy enough that I probably won’t use it. In contrast, I use tags all the time in Bear because they aren’t so weird.
Sharing
One good thing about Apple Notes is that you can collaborate with other people on a given note. But even that gives me fits. You click the little share icon (the box with the up arrow, or as some people like to call it, the “sharrow”). At the top, it shows the title of your note, and then there’s a dropdown that’s defaulted to Collaborate. You can change it to “Send a Copy”, but my goal here is to collaborate.
You can control who can access: invited people vs. anyone with the link, and you can set permissions – whether they can make changes or only view. There’s also a pre-checked checkbox to allow others to invite.
Ok, that’s all pretty intuitive. But then I get stuck because I’m never confident of what I should do next. There’s no “go” button at this point. I see a row with the four people or groups I’ve recently sent Apple Messages to, and then a list of applications. A few of them look promising like Mail and messages, but the other options don’t make any sense. Sometimes I’ve seen Open in News, Freeform, Xcode Simulator, and even my Paprika Recipe Manager, but that list seems to change. When I see those options, it makes me wonder what this list is really about.
Along with Mail and messages, there’s an option that says Invite with Link. Ok, that sounds useful. This pops up a little window that says Create Link. You’d think that it would, well, create a link that you could copy and maybe paste into a text message or an email. Instead, you see a very plain window with an empty To: field, and a greyed-out Copy Link. It says to add people. How? With what information? Probably not their Mastodon handle, but is it an email address? Does it have to be their Apple Account email address? I literally have no idea.
I clicked in the “To:” field and a plus button appeared. Tapping that opened a mini-version of my Contacts. In here it’s a free-for-all. You can put in email addresses of any type or a phone number. I enlisted Jill from the Northwoods to test what would happen next. I put in her non-Apple account email address, and then it allowed me to click the Copy Link button.
I sent her the link over Telegram, and it told her she had to verify her email address by sending her an email. She clicked the link from that email and it took her to iCloud.com where she had to log in with her Apple Account email and then she could see the note. I’m glad to know that it worked, and I think it’s kind of cool that I didn’t have to have the right address for her to still be able to get in. I can’t tell you how many times I try to invite someone to a Google doc and I use the wrong email address, and they have to request access.
My main point is that I eventually figure out how to share a Note every time I need to, but it doesn’t seem intuitive to me. I’m sure if I did this all the time, I’d probably get used to it. Is it just me?
Formatting Agony
The main reason I dislike Notes is how cumbersome it is to format text on iPad and iPhone. If the joy of Notes is that we can write them on any of our Apple devices, then it needs to be good on all of our Apple devices.
On the Mac, I can use keystrokes for Bold, Italics, and Underline. I can use keystrokes to make headings, links, and even code blocks in a monospaced font.
But all of these options are buried under multiple taps on the iPhone and iPad. Let’s say I want to make a word bold. First, I have to tap on the “Aa” to bring up the formatting options. This is equivalent to using the dropdown menu on the Mac. I can tap the B for Bold, but I can’t now start typing in bold. It’s waiting to see if I want to make bullets or do strikeout or add some highlighting. In order to get back to typing, I have to hit the X button.
I know that extra step isn’t huge, but now I type my word, and I don’t want the next word made bold. I have to tap the Aa, then tap B to unbold, and then tap the X again. That’s six steps to make a word bold.
You might think I’d be better off typing the word, selecting it, and making it bold. That does make it one entire step shorter if I count the double-tap to select as one step. I type the word, double-tap it, tap the Aa, tap the B to make it bold. I can’t start typing because that Aa menu is still up, but I figured out a trick. I can tap to get my cursor at the end of the word without Xing away the formatting bar. That means I can tap the B again at the end to stop using bold, and then tap the X to make the formatting menu go away. Did you count the steps? It’s still six.
Maybe people who like Apple Notes never do any formatting when on iOS. Maybe they go back to their Macs to make headings and checklists and such. Of my annoyances with Apple Notes, this is the one thing that bothers me the most.
Tables
Making tables in Apple Notes isn’t bad. It’s pretty easy to add a column or a row. On the Mac, if you select a column, you get a 3-dot button at the top and also a downward chevron. Select the chevron and you can add a column before or after the current column.
On iPhone and iPad, selecting the 3-dot button pops up a menu that allows you to add a column but you don’t get a choice of whether to put it before or after. I don’t know why that’s not an option, but it’s pretty easy to press and hold on the three-dot button and drag them back and forth. It’s one of my favorite features of Apple Notes.
Interestingly, this popup menu gives you way more options on iPhone and iPad than you get on macOS. You can format the column (bold, italic, underline, and strikethrough), and you can copy or cut the column or row.
As much as I like tables in Apple Notes, there’s one thing that I don’t like about it. You cannot change the justification of the text in a table. It is always left justified. No fancy center or right justification for you.
Handwriting and Drawing
iOS 18 is bringing us a bunch of cool stuff in Notes for using Apple Pencil on iPad (or I suppose scribbling with your finger on an iPhone.) I’ve played around a bit with it, and while I think these new features have quite a ways to go to be super useful, they will all suffer my rage because of one thing about Apple Notes.
Anything you write with Pencil is in a separate region of any text-based content in the same note. You can’t draw next to some text, it has to be either above or below the text, and that’s it. There’s actually a visible line of demarcation between these regions. You can’t see it all the time, but as you tap around trying to figure out where you can type vs. draw, you’ll see a horizontal brownish-gold line with a little triangle stuck to the left. The triangle seems to imply you could drag it up and down, but you can’t. I think it’s just there to say, “KEEP OUT!”
When I’ve got a combination of drawing and text, I find myself repeatedly tapping trying to find the safe place to type.
I should note that you can drop a floating text box next to your scribbling which is better than nothing.
I did an experiment to see how well you can alternate drawing and typing. I did some handwriting (and it was kinda cool how it cleaned it up a bit). Then I typed below that, and then I did some more handwriting. That gave me three distinct regions: scribbling, text, and scribbling.
I used the selection tool (the pencil with the diagonal lines on it) to select my second section of scribbling. This allowed me to drag the scribbling around. But guess what happens if you try to drag a scribble above one of those lines of demarcation? It disappears! Even if I drag the second scribble up next to the first one, it still disappears. That just ain’t right.
I can’t see giving up my beloved Notability for drawing and handwriting and typing all piled into the same note. It’s not perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than Apple Notes.
Notes are Not Portable
The final complaint I’ll issue about Apple Notes that keeps me from using it for anything I care about is that the notes aren’t portable to different apps, or even easily exportable.
I distinctly remember when Bart first tried to get me to get on the Markdown train and he explained the joy of a plain-text format that you can use anywhere. I’ve become accustomed to knowing that any Markdown file I create I can open in Ulysses, in Typora, in Keep It, and heck, even in Text Edit. Any app used to open a Markdown file will retain all of the formatting because it’s all there in plain text.
But Apple Notes are stuck there. As we came across in the Sharing options, you can send a copy of a note to someone, but guess what? All of the formatting is stripped away.
You can’t export your notes on your own, either in bulk or even one-by-one. There’s no “Save As” or “Export to”.
I was careful to say you can’t export notes on your own, because you can ask Apple to do it at iCloud.com. On Reddit, Alekzandriia gave the step-by-step process.
For science, I requested my Notes to be exported, and as Alekzandriia reported would happen, it took 5 days to create the export. Apple emailed me a link to download the 1.5GB zip file (which seems unusually large for only a thousand notes, 98% of which don’t have images.) When I expanded the zip file, I got a CSV and two more zip files.
I opened the first of the two zip files, and it contained just four folders – the four folders I have in Apple Notes. This is going to sound confusing, but one of those folders is called simply “Notes”. Inside that folder seems to be a single folder for nearly all of my notes.
In each note’s folder, most of the time you’ll see a plain text file (.txt) and an attachments folder which contains any images that were embedded in the note. If they’d chosen to give us Rich Text Format (.rtf) files with the images, the images would have stayed embedded in the notes in their original location in the text. With a plain text file, you have no idea where those images were.
Another thing you lose because they chose plain text files instead of RTF for export is 100% of your formatting. There are no headings, nothing is bold or underlined, there are no bulleted or numbered lists and of course you don’t get any checkboxes.
Maybe you’re not much of a scribbler in Apple Notes, but if you are, any notes that had scribbles in them simply don’t come across at all as a .txt file. They’re not included. If you had images in the notes, you’ll get those as attachments but that’s it.
I’ve just given you the good news. Remember I said there were two zip files? My second zip file, which is 800MB in size, won’t expand at all. I get an error that says “inappropriate file type or format.” So that’s nice. Nearly a week to get total garbage.
To pile on the lack of exportability, one of the things I often want to do is just save an image that I’ve pasted into a note. In Notes on the Mac, if you right-click on the file, there’s no Save As option. There is the option to open the attachment and it will pop up in whatever app you have designated to open that format of file. You can also double-click the image to open it in the external app. From the external app you can do a Save As. I guess I should be grateful that Apple lets us do it at all.
Oddly it’s easier to save an image from Notes on iOS. Tap on the file once and it will open as big as possible with black bars around it. Tap again and there are two ways to get to the save file option. In the bottom left is a share icon which will reveal all of the sharing options, and one is Save to Files. I found that share icon a bit difficult to select though – it kept going back to the black bar view. An easier way is to tap at the top of the screen on the downward chevron next to “Pasted Graphic”. This reveals Save to Files, Save to Photos, Print, and it can take you to the full Share menu.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that I keep trying to use Apple Notes and I keep trying to figure out what everyone else likes about Apple Notes, but I remain baffled by the love this app gets. I use Apple Notes only when I know for a fact that I never need to reference that particular note again and I know I won’t want to use the information in any other way.
I’m experimenting with the new features to smooth out your handwriting and with Math Notes but I’m not yet ready to give a review on those features.
If you think I’m judging it unfairly and you feel joy when you use Apple Notes, I would love to hear what you like about it.