Feature Parity in Apple Notes

I have a love and occasional hate relationship with Apple Notes. And a mostly hate and kind fond memory relationship with my longstanding notes application, Evernote. So for the past few months I’ve slowly and tediously shifting a few thousand notes from one service to another.

This is the story of why, the joys and miseries of the decision, and what I hope Apple changes in future versions of its note taking application.

Evernote’s Trust and Pricing Deficit

Evernote has some serous problems to my eye. I like some of its features, such as the ability to search .PDFs and adding tags to different notes. But these features aren’t enough to overcome the baseline problem that I no longer trust Evernote with my content. There are two core reasons underscoring this lack of trust: the company’s questionable stance on users’ privacy and the company’s willingness to increase prices without providing a corresponding improvement in their services.

In case you missed it, Evernote announced a plan to have specific employees read the content their users added to their notes. The employee would be reading users’ notes to improve on the machine learning algorithms that Evernote was rolling out. Those algorithms, themselves, meant to improve the services provided to users.

So the company was only going to infringe on its users’ privacy for the best of reasons.

The company backed off from its decision pretty quickly in the wake of a media backlash. Nevertheless, the initial decision left a bad taste in my mouth. How could I trust a company that had so cavalierly indicated a willingness to intrude upon their users’ private content? Some people use Evernote for personal journaling, others to manage their businesses, some to store medical information, and yet others for their research and professional writing. On what possible grounds could anyone at a company based on storing people’s thoughts and dreams think it would be appropriate to have employees read potentially sensitive notes? I was already somewhat uneasy with the company but seriously started exploring ways out of their service following this particular privacy SANFU.

The second problem I had with the company was its decision to raise prices for professional users without providing a real benefit to end users. I get that companies sometimes have to adjust their pricing but as a long-standing user it seemed like I was being penalized after trusting the company in its infancy. It just seemed wrong to penalize very early adopters such as myself who’d championed the application from an early point in the company’s existence. There should have been a grace period, at the very least, if not an actual grandfathering of long term users’ prices.

So in the advent of these issues, combined with a decreasing enjoyment of the user interface and user experience more generally, I decided that I wanted out.

Enter Apple Notes

I’ve used Apple Notes off and on for a lot of years. And until the updates that came in iOS 9 I’ve generally stayed away. The service has just been deeply underwhelming in terms of its organization of different notes, to say nothing of the annoyances I had with sharing notes with other people.

The worst of those annoyances have been dealt with in a few ways:

1. I can organize folders and use macOS to nest different folders in one another, which is essential for me to keep my notes in some semblance of order.
2. I can search through notes with relative ease on all my Apple devices, though I admit this is an area where improvements would be delightful.
3. I have more faith in Apple to push back against efforts to access my notes through a legal process, and to protect the privacy of my notes’ contents using best security practices.

Furthermore, I’m already paying for iCloud storage. As a result, shifting my Evernote documents to Apple Notes will likely leave me with a little more money in my bank account each year.

The actual writing experience in Apple Notes is a bit threadbare. That’s ok on the whole – the ability to add headings and titles, along with some baseline formatting is almost enough – and share sheets have made it a lot more pleasant to send a note to a colleague or collaborator.

Aside: The Miseries of Note Migration

There are some automated ways to pull data out of Evernote and into other note taking applications, including Apple Notes. But I’m not using them for two separate reasons.

First, I want to be able to re-curate all the stuff that’s collected in Evernote over then past years. So that means that I want to put my own eyes on old notes to determine what should and shouldn’t make the cut. I’ve shed about a thousand notes thus far and I’m pretty sure that even are going to vanish into the digital ether.

Second, the way I organized notes in Evernote changed over the years that I was using it. I did a lot of learning while using the application which mean that I changed my tagging and notebook structures a few times. That meant there was a pretty bad mess I’d built up and I wanted that cleaned up.

I should acknowledge that Evernote also put a lot of really badly formatted notes in my various notebooks and I’m spending more time than is really appropriate to fix up those notes. Specifically, I used the company’s web clipping tool on a regular basis and the way it clipped pages was often sub-par (to be generous). In some cases it meant that HTML was laced through notes. In others, the clipped pages were filled with ads and other badly formatted junk; this was the result of website publishers having to incorporate ads and ruin the user experience.

I should be blunt: I was working around the deficiencies of Evernote’s clipping service. Apple Notes has its own problems and deficiencies and, between the two, Evernote is actually better at clipping than Apple.

Limitations of Apple Notes

There’s still room for improvements with Apple Notes.

iOS is definitely an area that is still developing, and I periodically come across things that haven’t been implemented for some reason. One of the teething struggles associated with iOS’s Notes s linked with share sheets: why can I share a note with someone, but not a folder containing multiple notes? My use case is this: I often collect resources for ongoing projects in folders and it’d be great to be able to share all of those items, at once, as opposed to on an individual basis.

In a related vein, I’d be delightful to be able to:

• Add hyperlinks to text in the Notes applications for iOS;
• Create sub-folders in the iOS application (I can do it in macOS so why not in iOS?);
• In macOS, automatically create a note when I drag a file — such as a .pdf, .doc, or other file — into the application.

I also really, really wish that Notes on iOS and macOS supported smart folders and tags. macOS already supports that kinds of functionality in Finder and (to an extent) iTunes and Photos! Adding these kinds of functions into the Notes application would mean I could more easily use the same note in multiple folders. The use case? I often keep reviews of articles and documents in Apple Notes and subsequently want to organize them into additional folders for specific papers that I’m writing or blog posts I’m drafting. As it stands now I need to make total copies of notes and re-create them in folders for the given paper or blog. That’s nuts: I shouldn’t be doubling or tripling notes.

But maybe it’s just too hard to do all that. So if I had to ask for a smaller thing it’d be this: please, please, please just let me pin important notes to the top of different folders in notes.

Finally, it’d be amazing if there was some integration of Markdown functionality. I don’t imagine that’s going to happen anytime soon, but it’d be nice.¹ A better web clipping service would also be helpful: Evernote did a not good but generally serviceable if not good job of that and Notes just sucks in comparison.

NOTE: This was originally posted on Medium.