Why I use Apple Notes instead of Obsidian

And how Apple Notes could be much better-to-perfect.

Field notes from my annual note taking rumspringa

I went through my annual “I should try to use Obsidian” cycle last month. As always, I went back to Apple Notes after a few weeks.

Here’s my read-out of this year’s cycle.¹

Notebook philosophies

First, here’s an Apple Notes method to get an Obsidian/Notion feel, briefly mentioned this week on our podcast. The method also gives you a sense of what the hard-core Obsidian philosophy is. For me, it’s over the top and too much work - but I do admire the Shortcuts cleverness.

The two things I like about the Obsidian philosophy are

1. Store your plaintext/markdown files in directories. I found syncing Obsidian with iCloud to be not good (you very often have to wait). I could use/pay for the Obsidian Sync service, but then that defeats much of the plain text point. Drafts, in contrast, does not have plain text, but because (I think?) it uses the iCloud sync services, it works extremely well, “seamlessly.” Related: editing in markdown, markdown being “native.”

2. The Obsidian Daily Note feature. I like the idea of have a daily note that’s the “hub” of everything you do. This is easy to do manually (I do it in Apple Noes), but making it core to the notebook philosophy is really nice. You can set a template (or use the default) and it’s auto-created for you. Of course, inherent in this is Obsidians first philosophic principle: linking notes (in both directions) is what makes them valuable, e.g., hyperlinks/WWW/Hypercard.

3. The command palette. This is one of the best UI metaphors of the past ~15 years and is used in many other apps. You can add this in to all of MacOS with Paletro, but having the app’s features built to use a command palette is best.

My friction with Obsidian:

1. I sort of like the plugin community…but I found them very mixed as far as quality. And after a while, I added so many that it made things a mess. It was like having to many icons in the menu bar, or too many apps on my phone.

2. As always, I really like using the Apple Pencil: I’m Gen-X, so I grew up with hand-writing as a core writing method, on par with typing. More importantly, it’s a core thinking method, especially when combined with drawing. A a sheet of A3 paper in landscape mode with a blue-ink Pilot G2 0.5mm is still the way I get my best thinking done. Support for the Apple Pencil in Obsidian is still too weird for me. The Excildraw (or whatever) solution in Obsession just didn’t feel good to me. I still think Goodnotes is the clear best-in-class for the Apple Pencil life, but their text handling (last I checked) is not good - hence, I compromise to the “suite” of Apple Notes, giving up the best-in-class of Goodnotes. I used Goodnotes for years, but you throw out all your plain text dreams and pretty much everything else you expect form a general notebook app with them.

3. Aesthetics. I just can’t get with the text editor feel, the vibe, of Obsidian. I feel like a skinny jeans guy in a JNCO scene.

Apple Notes “secrets” and making Apple Notes beter

There are many things that would make Apple Notes better, and wrapped up in those are ways that it’s good:

1. Make it better: The option to store notes as plain text/markdown in a file system (iCloud). Technically, this is not a big deal at all as numerous notebook apps show (Obsidian, Bear,² just using a text editor). Privacy wise, I completely trust Apple the most of any tech company so I don’t mind storing my stuff with them. (The privacy marketing works!!)

2. Related: proper exporting. Apple Notes doesn’t have have no batch exporting and you can only export to a PDF. There’s programatic ways to export, and even hacks (I believe what you do is just load up the sqlite database Apple Note use and then Bob’s your uncle). You can use the third party Exporter app instead, which I recommend, but it should be built into Apple Notes.

3. A markdown mode. It’s 2025, markdown is a native way of writing for many people. QED.

4. You should be able to mix together text and Apple Pencil drawings like you can in Goodnotes. Right now, they’re separate sections of a note. I can live with that (I do!) but it’d be cooler if the type input types could overlap.

5. I don’t really understand, rather, know all of the philosophy of Quick Notes. It’s intriguing, but feels wrong, at best, anemic-weird. After a few more years of iterating over this feature, it could really be something. If you don’t already have an ingrained bookmarking philosophy (I was born into del.icio.us and so now use pinboard.in, and I can’t fathom any other way to live),³ using Quick Notes would be perfect for stashing content/bookmarking. Also, I think there’s some method you could come up with to use Quick Notes for Daily Notes - you can set it up so that you append your Quick Notes to the same note instead of creating one each time…at least on the iPhone?⁴

6. ChatGPT’s desktop app works with Apple Notes. You can bind (or whatever it’s called) a ChatGPT session to the currently open Note. It’s like copying the Note into a chat. (Does it sync/update the Note text as you change it, or just take an initial copy? Can you have it change the note?) This could be interesting. If Apple Intelligence finally left toddlerhood and had a chat panel along side a note (like Gemini in Google Docs), and also let you add in the context of other Notes, shit would get real interesting. For example, I’ve exported all my journal entries (going back to 2009) with the Exporter tool to markdown, put them into big-ass files by year, and uploaded them to a project in ChatGPT so that I can use ChatGPT as a therapist and ask it “what the fuck is wrong with me?” It’s pretty good! With this kind of setup you’d also want to do local LLM’ing, and if Apple implemented MCP it’d could be amazing.⁵

7. PDF editing. This is so close to what you want with managing your PDF library. My “PDF library” is just a directory system of, you know, PDFs. As always, the problem is Apple Notes disgust with file systems. If Apple Notes stored the PDFs your editing/using in the file system instead of in Apple Notes, it’d be awesome.

8. The voice memo recording is a good start. It stores your original recording and a transcript. It needs to have the one button, start recording right away feature that Just Press Record, Voice Memos, and Drafts has, though. Right now it takes four to five buttons/clicks/taps to just start recording.

9. Integration to other Apple apps. There’s some integrations, but they can always be better. In particular, it’s absurd that the Journal app is an island - it should just be part of Notes, probably a button in a note to “create/build a Journal entry.” Freeform is excellent, but it’s also an island. Reminders is pretty good, and it should be integrated into Apple Notes: the check lists in Apple Note should show up/be lists in Reminders and vice-versa. All these integrations could be optional, etc. I don’t use Apple Mail, but I’m sure there is and could be stuff there.

There’s all sorts of other things in my wishlist, but they’re minor. Even the Daily Note automation is pretty far down the list.

It’s worth looking at the Apple Notes manual. Apple is total shit at devrel’ing it’s apps (detailed explanations, demos, and telling you their PoV - the “philosophy” I talk about above), so you have to really dig into their docs to understand Apple Noes and learn the intermediate and above features.

For example, did you know you can type “>>” to get a popup of other Notes to link to? Did you know you can keep typing to search over the Notes? The document scanning is good (built in the Files app too).⁶ Smart Folders in general and to do things like show all notes with unchecked check boxes is good. And so forth.

The Mac Stories people are pretty good at filling in the gaps, and you can pick through the usual mountain of Internet garbage to find a few gems here and there.

In conclusion: #DefaultsLifestyle Forever!

Colophon: that I wrote this all in Drafts and then copied it as rich text into Substack, where I then did further editing, is further commentary on Apple Notes that’s worth pondering when you have nothing else more exciting to do.

Somewhere in Houston, November, 2006.

Logoff

That’s enough for today. I’ll try to bundle up the usual links and stuff next episode.

(That said, there’s three pieces of original content for you this week, all podcasts: Software Defined Talk #501, Whitney and I’s interview with Sasha, and my guesting on Cloud Foundry weekly.)

1. Can I throw out a Merlin Mann style disclaimer here? It is: I know, I know. (But, no, guys, seriously, I know!) But I’m really, like really, not interested in hearing how I’m doing it wrong. Trust me, I know already (see above), and this is the system I’ve come up with, filled with comprise and trade-offs, but that I like. Some people like potatoes and some people don’t - it’s not because they’re doing potatoes wrong, it’s because they don’t like potatoes. They are both wrong and insane, for the record, but let them eat their truth and I certainly don’t tell them why they’re doing it wrong. I mean, look at the person in this room, November 22nd, 1995. Can’t you just intuit - feel in your bones - that over the next 29 years, 1 month, 2 weeks, and 5 days that that person has tried every note taking system, analog and digital, known to humanity? That person and I share a name: me!

2. I like Bear a lot. They got so close to the ideal notebook system with their Panda prototype - using plain text files - but then folded that back into their usual database driven thing. Also, I never got a feel for their Apple Pencil support. I know Ulysses has good plain text file support - I haven’t checked on their Apple Pencil support. As with Apple Notes, most of these apps treat Apple Pencil input as a separate thing, not mixed in with the text notes like Goodnotes. (Yeah. Like I pleaded at the start: don’t worry, I know.)

3. This is a “productivity” hole you can go down and never come back from. Beware staring too long into that abyss. If you are prone to this kind of abyss staring, I urge you to never click this link.

4. This raises a typical Apple product problem: Apple Notes doesn’t often have feature parity between the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Like, whatever.

5. Apple would never do this. They seem to willingly say ignorant of the rest of the computing world and act as if they don’t realize that there are other tech companies and software besides themselves. (I mean, sure, my revealed preferences show that I love the results, or, at least, tolerate them.)

6. The Adobe Scanner app is much better, but their uncontrollable need to upsell you is fucking annoying. Feel free to tell me once, but not every time I use the app. At the very least, it should be included with other bundles, like Adobe Express which I pay for and love. The Adobe pricing and packaging are out-to-lunch on the $119.88/year price tag for removing the nags from Adobe Scanner. Still, top-notch app.