

Apple Notes Expected To Gain Markdown Support (daringfireball.net) 22
According to 9to5Mac, "Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years." Apple enthusiast and co-creator of the Markdown markup language, John Gruber, is not a fan. From a blog post: Some people find this surprising, but I personally don't want to use a Markdown notes app. I created Markdown two decades ago and have used it ever since for one thing and one thing only: writing for the web at Daring Fireball. My original description of what it is still stands: "Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers." Perhaps an even better description of Markdown is Matthew Butterick's, from the documentation for Pollen: "Markdown is a simplified notation system for HTML."
The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or database field. That's not what Apple Notes is or should be. I can see why many technically-minded people want to use Markdown "everywhere." It's quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, seemingly continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a "Markdown editor," even as an option. It's trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax; it shouldn't be possible to have a malformed note in Apple Notes. I craft posts for Daring Fireball; I dash off notes in Apple Notes. [...]
But Markdown export from Notes? That sounds awesome. Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude -- PDF and, of all formats, Pages. Exporting and/or copying the selected text as Markdown would be pretty cool. Very curious to see how they handle images though, if this rumor is true.
The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or database field. That's not what Apple Notes is or should be. I can see why many technically-minded people want to use Markdown "everywhere." It's quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, seemingly continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a "Markdown editor," even as an option. It's trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax; it shouldn't be possible to have a malformed note in Apple Notes. I craft posts for Daring Fireball; I dash off notes in Apple Notes. [...]
But Markdown export from Notes? That sounds awesome. Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude -- PDF and, of all formats, Pages. Exporting and/or copying the selected text as Markdown would be pretty cool. Very curious to see how they handle images though, if this rumor is true.
That's not the biggest problem with Apple Notes (Score:2)
With most of Apple's offerings (not just Notes), I think the biggest problem is just how far behind everyone else they are with regards to sharing. It took forever for them to add the ability to share *at all*, and even now the functionality seems like it was bolted on in a half-assed manner.
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Wh
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If you're a long-time front end developer, it probably won't do much for you. The target market is folks who want basic layout and typographic control without having to become a front end developer.
Personally I question it as an export format. There are several different implementations that all behave a bit differently, what does interop look like?
Re: Markdown (Score:2)
Nothing like HTML. Itâ(TM)s far more lightweight and interferes with legibility a lot less. I couldnâ(TM)t imagine trying to type Slack messages on my phone in HTML, what a nightmare, but its flavour of MD is fine. Iâ(TM)m surprised you havenâ(TM)t encountered because itâ(TM)s everywhere. I will have used it in GitLab, Jira and Slack by mid-morning, and maybe somewhere else too.
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Yes, Markdown is crap and it's tragic that it ever became so popular.
It's basically plain text with some basic formatting stuff, but with weird choices like a single asterisk being for italic, and double for bold. It has multiple ways of doing the same thing, like underscores can be for bold as well, and line breaks are a complete mess.
Because it translates to HTML, there is no support for basic things like tabs. Whatever limitations HTML has, Markdown has. As such it's become common for editors to allow in
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is crap and it's tragic that it ever became so popular
Doesn't compute. Crap things don't become popular unless people find value in them. The fact that it became popular shows that it fits a need that people have - those people don't think it's crap.
You may not like it but that's a different discussion.
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That's why this keeps happening. Someone finds value in it, but instead of saying "that's a good idea, but the implementation was clearly thought up over a weekend and specific to this guy's needs, so I should improve it and create something better" they just try to wedge it into their use-case.
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So make a better Markdown with blackjack and hookers if that's your thing. The reality is it fits the needs of the people who use it, and especially for many formatting situations it's far better than HTML (which it was nominally replacing).
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I've been thinking about it. Ideally it could be an extension to Markdown. The real problem is the ubiquity of HTML, because it doesn't support a lot of features. So even if I created a better alternative and did the work to get it into apps I like, it would be limited by the fact that e.g. HTML can't handle tabs.
So maybe the place to start is with HTML and trying to get that to adopt some features.
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hey buddy, its called an opinion. figure it out.
No. Defining something as crap is not an opinion. An opinion is why something may be crap for your use case. Declaring something crap overall is ignorance, not opinion.
I'd just be happy with better IMAP support (Score:2)
I use Notes with my Dovecot IMAP server. It works, but sync is oftentimes VERY slow. You can speed it up by going to the calendar app and refreshing the calendars (which is odd, because my calendars are on a totally separate CALDAV server).
It's been like this for many years. I realize I'm in the minority of notes users but reporting the bug doesn't seem to help much either.
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Apple doesn't care for minority users like me. Others and I are old school who still use local USB sync. We don't use iClouds. macOS Calendar sync broke (not updating since macOS Ventura) between iPhones and MacOS' Calendar. :(
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Re: Markup, Stupid! (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s a stupid question, but you were just trying to whinge about something completely unrelated, werenâ(TM)t you? The only way this issue will be fixed is if /. fixes its bugs. Until then: weep. It must be frustrating knowing that /. will never fix this bug as they donâ(TM)t spend money and are just try to squeeze out a dwindling supply of revenue from a niche website with declining numbers and an audience whoâ(TM)s very proactive about blocking ads.
I think... (Score:2)
I'd rather have Treasury Notes
I don't agree with Gruber here (Score:2)
Markdown is now a way doing shorthand formatted typing, effectively. What it's original purpose was is interesting, but not a limitation ('make', for example, was not made for software development but for compiling books). I'm computer-centric, not mobile-centric. A way of formatting bullets and tabl
It's also good for communication with AI (Score:1)
Cow, barn door (Score:2)
Gruber Supports Markdown Export (Score:1)