Apple Notes is the Only Game in Town. And that’s a Bad Thing
At the time of writing, I have 2,417 notes in Apple’s Notes app. Some are little more than post-it notes or shopping lists, but the majority of them are lengthy and include web clippings and images. In total, that amounts to just over 4GB of notes. I've used the app for years. And I hate myself for it.
The app is tremendously convenient. If you are in the Apple ecosystem, the way your notes seamlessly sync between your devices is marvellous. Over the years, Apple has added more and more features, building the app into something far more sophisticated than the shopping list creator of old. Notes can be organised in an increasingly complex hierarchy of folders and subfolders, tagged, searched and shared. It has become a one-stop shop for data management.
Like many writers, Apple Notes is an integral part of my workflow. I moved to it several years ago after being an avid user of Evernote. I transcribe historical documents as plain text files and deposit snippets that I think might be useful for a certain project in the relevant folder in the Apple Notes app. In so doing, I create a sourcebase for whatever it is I am writing. I can find a relevant piece of information within the Notes app, rather than going back to the original (and sometimes lengthy) transcription. I see Notes as a timesaver. A butler who arranges my material. Recently, however, I’ve realised that I’m in too deep.
My employer provided me with a Windows laptop. I’m not a huge fan of Windows and haven’t used it full time in many years, but I thought I should go all-in as my work’s security policies are all built around these managed Windows laptops. No problem, I thought: I can access Apple Notes through the web browser. I quickly realised that this method is no where near as convenient or powerful as having the native app. I started to consider how I would get my Apple Notes into Windows.
This is where being in Apple’s walled garden, so fabulously convenient and slick, became quickly a prison. Exporting large numbers of notes from Apple’s Notes app is almost impossible.
Unlike Evernote, the Apple Notes app does not allow notes to be exported in bulk. Notes can be exported individually through various menus, but mass exporting is not possible from the app. Apparently, you can request your data from Apple but the process can take several days and the items you receive rarely play nice with other apps. I tried to drag and drop to Evernote and OneNote: nothing. I found a workaround using drag and drop on the iPad version of Notes, but this would only work when moving the files to Apple’s iCloud service; exported a limited number at a time; and converted them into a rich text format that is quite niche file format (.rtfd).
There’s a scene in The Simpsons where the family join a cult. During the indoctrination sessions, members of the group stand up to leave. As they do so, a bright light from above shines down on them with a disembodied voice saying: 'you’re free to leave, but do you mind telling us why?' Cowed by this pressure, the person quietly sits down and never leaves. I was starting to feel something similar.
Unaccustomed to the iPad's necessary drag and drop dexterity, and unwilling to use such a file format, I turned to the internet for help. I found a wonderful MacOS app called 'Converter'. This will search the original folders in which Apple Notes are stored and download them into markdown. With such a large volume of notes, the process took a little while but it worked, with a caveat: notes with images were split, with the image stored outside of the text file. Nevertheless, the app does what it says on the tin: it converts Notes into a format that is far more versatile. It even maintains your original folder structure.
Apple’s fabulously convenient Notes app has rendered all rival notes platforms redundant for a large swathe of users. It is the definitiion of a sticky app: it’s utility keeps you planted firmly into Apple’s ecosystem. Unfortunately, Apple is making it nigh-on-impossible to get your notes -- your data -- into any other app. WIthout resorting to my Mac, there is no way I could have reclaimed my notes. And as someone who has huge amounts of (to me) critical material on there, that worries the hell out of me.
I suppose much of our experience in the world is a trade off between convenience and freedom. I know I’m giving away some of my data when I use Google Docs, but I get a nice tool in return. With Apple products, the company trumpets the safety of your data but offers few ways to get it out in a way that is usable. These actions are roadblocks to innovation but they are also inhibiting seriously the work of creatives who need to be free to use the tools they want to complete their work.
If these technologies are bicycles for the mind, it might be nice to have the chain removed from the wheel once in a while.
