David Sparks on Apple Notes

David Sparks:

Then I stated using Apple Notes and the strangest thing happened. I liked it. Not only is Apple Notes a contender, Apple has continued to refine the product. Just last week we got a new beta of an upcoming Mac OS X release that includes additional Apple Notes features. One of those new features is the ability to import Evernote and plain text files. It seemed to me like a perfect excuse to slurp in the rest of my nvALT database so I could really push the application’s limits. Now I’ve got 787 notes in my Apple Notes database. It’s growing daily.

So first this was all a big experiment to see what was wrong with Apple Notes and then I just started using the application. I didn’t admit to myself, or anyone else, that I become an Apple Notes user but apparently I have.

Now that its syncing is based on CloudKit instead of IMAP, and with the features that have been added in iOS 9 and Mac OS X 10.11, Apple Notes is a solid notes app. I echo Sparks on this complaint:

That doesn’t mean Apple Notes is without fault. I wrote before, and it still remains true, that the text size on the Mac version is just too small. They keep adding new features with the betas and it keeps amazing me that they don’t address this problem.

It’s almost mind boggling that you can’t change the default font size on the Mac. It’s not just a matter of preference, it’s a genuine accessibility problem. You can hit ⌘+ to increase the font size of the current note, but there’s no way to change the default for new notes. So if Helvetica 12 is too small for you to read, you’re stuck hitting ⌘+ for every single note.

Update: And why is it Helvetica instead of San Francisco? Does the Apple Notes Mac team live in a cave?

★ Wednesday, 2 March 2016