> Instead of tapping buttons to bold text or create headers, users could type *bold* or # Header directly into their notes.
Which will be more keystrokes, not fewer – it's faster to get to the formatting buttons than it is the punctuation keyboard on iOS, and even on Mac the shortcut commands are often faster too.
Notes was a fanastic example of a rich-text environment, but if Markdown input helps the die-hards that is great, so long as I don't have to ever see, use or be aware of it.
I tend to copy Markdown content from other sources into Apple Notes. Being able to paste into Notes and have it format in the view is a big win.
It is possible reporting is getting this wrong and the Markdown feature and it is just to serve use case above. As an example, Google Docs recently enabled "Paste from Markdown" that also is a huge convenience.
Yeah, this would be huge for me; I often toss a bunch of notes into an Apple Notepad note just to have it in my pocket, and everything I write with a keyboard is markdown.
This just makes it so I don't have to stare at a bunch of random characters and can have actual formatting. A win in my book!
Apple Notes is used not only with onscreen keyboards in iOS, but also with physical keyboards in iPadOS and macOS, where familiarity with Markdown input could make it faster than shortcut commands.
I think it’s user preference. For me it’s easier to get to the punctuation asterisk (basically muscle memory and <0.5s) than to tap the formatting menu, wait for the keyboard sheet to go down and the formatting sheet to go up, tap Bold, then tap the X and wait for animations to complete again (which I have no muscle memory for and need to look at every UI element that I’m tapping).
But formatting already-typed text on iOS is incredibly fiddly (as you have to select a text span first, and iOS fights you every step of the way when you do this — especially if the span starts or stops at something iOS doesn't consider a "whole token.")
Meanwhile, inserting punctuation representing formatting into already-typed text, merely requires placing the insertion caret, which is much less fiddly.
I was just typing a reply to gush about how much I agree with you and how awful iOS text editing is (I’m on my iPhone at the moment) and decided to play with editing text to get some example complaints, when I had an epiphany:
iOS lets you double tap to start a text selection now. I don’t know when this started. I’m 99% sure I used to long-press to start a text selection, and that it would start highlighting the word under the little preview bubble. My muscle memory is still to do this when I want to highlight text; it just never works and I always get frustrated.
Maybe if I start remembering to double tap to highlight text, the text editing experience might actually start to be passable? :shrug:
(Yes, I know about long pressing the keyboard to use it as a trackpad. I do that most of the time, but it’s still fiddly, it very very often misinterprets a tap and starts text selection wildly off from where I wanted it to, and the only fix is to tap around in the text area.)
But yes, you’re right about editable text being the difference: my memory of long pressing to highlight/select is exactly how text selection works for noneditable text, like in regular web sites in safari.
That’s the big inconsistency, and why I’m always frustrated by iOS text editing. Long pressing normal text highlights it, but long pressing editable text does not.
So it’s not that they changed something, it’s that the behavior is different for editable vs noneditable text, and my brain keeps doing the wrong one. Maybe now that I know about double tapping my brain can finally have a complete picture of the behavior split and I can stop fucking it up each time.
(Although I’m still pretty certain that doing a brief long press, but not long enough for the magnifying glass to show up, used to select a word of text. I can’t prove this though. Maybe I’m remembering the Force Touch days when you used to be able to do a Force Touch while long pressing to expand selection. That would make sense with the timeline.)
hm, here is the original iphone user guide for ios 3.1
> When you’re typing, you canalso double-tap to select a word. In read-only documents, such as webpages, or email or text messages you’ve received, touch and hold to select a word.
Also, double tapping selects by words in editable notes vs by letter in read-only, so the OS will continue to fight you feeble attempts at trying to have a consistent experience!
I don’t know if it’s just me, but it feels like it’s gotten more fiddly with time. Either that or I notice it more, because I’m using the thing more as time goes on.
I can’t understand people who use an iPad full time. My dad does this and I don’t know how he does drive himself mad with all the taps required to do basic things.
> iOS fights you every step of the way when you do this
oh, indeed, that's true even for simple movements: you tap somewhere, the cursors jumps there momentarily and then jumps back. You tap again, same thing. So the system knows what you want, but just "competently" engineered in a way to ignore you...
Which will be more keystrokes, not fewer – it's faster to get to the formatting buttons than it is the punctuation keyboard on iOS, and even on Mac the shortcut commands are often faster too.
Notes was a fanastic example of a rich-text environment, but if Markdown input helps the die-hards that is great, so long as I don't have to ever see, use or be aware of it.