Why Apple Notes may be the best note taking app

i have good news and bad news for you for today's video the good news is there are lots of really good note-taking apps that you can choose from to manage all of your data the bad news is there are lots and lots of really good note-taking apps that you need to choose from in order to maintain and manage your data now in the past we've looked at evernote i'm a big fan of evernote we've done videos on google keep but today i thought we would take a look at apple's notes app which is a real tour de force apple's done a terrific job of building a notes app that is really worth considering so that's what we're going to take a look at today the top features and the top things that set apple notes apart on dottotech [Music] steve dotto here how the heck you doing this fine day and we are looking at apple notes and what makes it a little bit special i think we'll break today's video down into three elements we'll start with a quick overview of apple notes so you can understand the basic functioning the basic features then we're going to dive into what i think are the unique things that apple has done combining their operating systems and their hardware integration in the unique aspects of apple's ecosystem to make some really compelling arguments for apple notes it's got some really very cool features i think you're going to want to pay attention to those and then we'll wrap things up by looking at some of the expected features the things that other notes applications have but apple notes also has to give you a complete picture of apple notes let's start our tour of apple notes on the desktop but be aware that note's power comes from in the in its appeal comes from how well it integrates on our mobile devices on our smartphone and our tablet so we'll make sure that we show you plenty of examples of that integration as we go through today but we'll begin to talk to you a little bit about the organizational structure of notes here on the desktop now the basic structure of notes is you have folders and the folders kind of replace notebooks and other note-taking apps so the folders contain all the collections of your notes and you can have multiple folders which give you a lot of organizational capability and you can nest folders within folders so you can create a nice hierarchical structure to your data now the one of the things that i think confuses some people about apple notes when they first start is you can store your notes you can use the online integration in a couple of different ways the preferred way is to use apple's icloud service because that gives you access to all of the features but you could also if you didn't use icloud you could also use apple notes and store them in google in your google drive system but that limits the number of features that are built in so it's not optimal you can also store notes locally on your device every device your computer your tablet or your note or your smartphone you have the option to have your default folder or any folder a local folder on the phone itself or on the device itself and again i don't think that's optimal i think most of the time when we're using a notes app we want ubiquitous syncing we want to sync in between all of the different uh all of our different platforms and that's the way i have mine set up you can see down here here's all of the different folder structure and you can see i have it available for me in both google and in icloud so i that's for demo purposes i don't think most people would have two notebooks like that it might get confusing most of you will just have it set up with your icloud integration so that's the basic file structure and organizational structure then we've got inside of each folder we of course have a list of all of our notes the note itself and then along the top we have our basic tools which gives you the simple control over the notes now apple notes isn't a tour de force as far as formatting and features inside of the note very basic formatting actually it's kind of nice you can choose some different formatting but it's very much html type formatting where we have titles headings subheadings you don't have a lot of granular control over the font etc so you can have a basic text note you can also take any aspect of your notes and you can turn them into a checklist and interestingly you can also create tables inside of apple notes i find that passing curious that that's a feature that they've added but it's useful if you choose to use it now it's not particularly useful if you're gonna be taking the note and then exporting it somewhere else because the table doesn't typically transfer into other word processing type applications uh but it is there and it's uh and if you are organizing your notes and you want the structure of a table it is there for you over here we have our sharing and our different assets that are available inside of apple notes we can create links we can manage the photos that are within the document we can set up sharing with others which is a powerful feature that all notes applications now should have is the ability to share your notes with others and also we have here the export capabilities there isn't another feature here there is another feature here which i will be talking about momentarily which is the ability to be able to lock notes which is one of the really high i think one of the real important features that's built into apple notes now before we leave and before we start diving into the demo part i should mention that i'm just showing you the basic folder structure here apple has another type of folder that's called smart folders and if we create a new folder you can choose to create a new regular folder or a new smart folder now smart folders i think are a little bit misnamed smart folders automatically collect information into the folder that apple believes should be in that folder and the way they do that is if we add tags to our notes as we create our notes so we can create a list of tags which gives you a different organizational tool but i think that's smart folders because what it does is if you have all of your tags that say youtube video ideas it'll then pull them all into a youtube video idea folder based on the tags i don't look at it so much as an organizational and file structure thing i look at it more as a search feature isn't it it's a different way to search and surface the information that we want but regardless it's there it's not something that i've used a lot uh looking on the web a lot of people i don't think it's a super popular feature but it can be confusing to people to have two different types of folders inside of apple notes recognize that for the most part we're just going to use regular folders if you want to dive into smart folders have at it i'm sure that you'll love it now the basic organizational structure and the basic use of apple notes is not particularly different from other note-taking apps let's look at the things that i think set apple notes apart and we're going to begin with siri apple notes integration with siri now people have a bit of a love-hate relationship with siri it's surprisingly efficient for some things and surprisingly disappointing in other areas when it comes to its integration with apple notes we're going to lean towards this surprisingly pleasant a pleasant surprise as far as how well siri integrates and here is the reason above all siri allows us to on the fly create instant notes just using our voice by invoking siri and asking siri to take a note so we say hey siri take a note what do you want it to say youtube idea compare google keep with apple notes okay i created a note youtube idea compare google keep with apple notes there we go and as soon as i've done that look here here inside of the desktop we have the note that's available to us right here so we can start to work with it so it's been synced across this ability to be able to on the fly when you're when you're presented with an idea an inspiration a obligation to be able to quickly create a note hands-free using siri is i think one of the most compelling aspects of apple notes it is a feature which you will come to rely on very quickly the siri integration with apple notes is in my mind the biggest differentiator between apple notes and other note-taking apps the next feature that i believe sets apple notes apart from the others is the ability to lock notes oh my goodness this is so sensible evernote users have been waiting and whining forever asking evernote to create some sort of password protection or encryption to our notes and it's just fallen on deaf ears google keep doesn't have this this is a real difference maker for apple notes is we have the ability to be able to lock individual notes and the beauty of this is it uses apple's built-in security system so you can lock your notes based on a password but you can also lock your notes and have them unlock based on touch id or face id which makes it incredibly convenient for locking notes now it's so good that a lot of people i know are using it to store their passwords and this is not something we would normally recommend and i don't i certainly don't recommend it right now i think a password manager is the proper way to store your passwords but i do feel better about those of you who've decided that you like to store all of your passwords in a note on your on your phone or on your computer if you have the ability to be able to lock that note behind a password so it is that much more secure i still don't think it's as good a system as having a password manager but some people don't want a password manager so the ability to lock your notes is a step in the right direction beyond the password beyond the password situation though the adjustability to lock your private information in notes is i think i think every note-taking app should have this ability and i think it's it's a big win as far as apple is concerned so the second feature inside of apple notes that sets it apart is the ability to be able to lock notes common sense now the third feature that's built into apple notes is the is the integration that apple's done in the hardware side between the camera and the notes app and they've done a really nice job of course apple's cameras on their smartphones and on their tablets very wonderful powerful tools but the integration in the way that it works with apple notes is something that i believe sets it apart i've got a new note here started on my smartphone and i'm going to just tap on the camera icon which will then allow me to import an image into the note that i'm working on so i can choose a photo or video from my camera roll and import a graphic into or a video into the note that i'm working on that's great i can also take a picture or a video a straight up picture or a video and i can import that into the note but look at these last two i can scan documents and i can scan text now many other note taking apps have this ability but it's how it's implemented here is what's so nice the first one i'm going to show you is scan text this is a surprising kind of little extra feature we've always been able to with many apps being able to capture a capture text in based information in an image as a document and have it go through and convert that into editable text that's something that most apps do the apple uh the apple notes app does that as well but this scan text eliminates the middle man watch this if i invoke that what it will do is it will go down and it will actually read the information that's on the page and it will convert it into text for us on the fly right in the note completely eliminating the need for us to grab a to grab a screen an image of it first uh before we do that isn't that cool i just love that that is just such a cool feature um the other let's let's start another note and let me show you the other the document processing side because capturing documents uh receipts or information from books or or anything like that capturing those documents is i think a really important feature for all notes applications to have and apple notes does a very good job so we're going to scan document and just like other document scanning apps it will go through and it will identify the outline of the document and it will take a picture for you and it will scan the document just like that so this uh this ability to be able to scan in the documents and to be able to then save them as a pdf at inside of the apple notes and then share them is i think a really powerful feature and i'm going to continue showing you this in a few moments because what we can do with these notes using apple notes makes it even more special so the first step is capturing text or capturing documents and saving them as notes let's now move away from my smartphone i'm just going to stop that recording there on the smartphone and let's move over onto my tablet and let me show you how this extends on the tablet so i'm going to now open up on my i've got an ipad pro here and i'm going to open up apple notes so if we take a look here on apple notes i have the note that i just created in this particular case for this example let's say i'm going to be going fishing with a buddy and i'm going to send in the information on where we're meeting in the lake so that he can prepare for fishing this is something you can tell it's springtime my mind is going to fishing but here we've got this document and you see that we've got it so that we can read it um but we've also got this image of the lake using your tablet apple notes really integrates nicely with the apple stylus with the apple pen and so if i then go under the share menu and choose under the share menu markup i can take this pdf document that apple has created from the scan and i can mark it up i can start i can choose different pen colors i can choose highlights i can say this is where we're going to be going and don't forget we're going to meet right over here this is where we're going to park is we're going to park over here and i can send them all of this information i can adjust obviously i can go into back and i can highlight something from the text let's just go back to the go back to the original page and i can mark that up as well by choosing the markup tool and i can choose the highlighter and i can highlight text within that page so that so that i have that highlighted for later so i've got all of this ability to be able to modify the information that i've captured inside of notes and it gets reflected right through the entire chain now i can take this document and let's just say done here on the smart on the tablet and let's go back to our computer and we can see that all of the marking up that we've done on the smartphone on the tablet is now reflected in the document which is synced there's the highlighting and there we have all of the other markup work that i did on that particular map so now we can of course take this and now we're kind of stepping out of the special features that are unique to apple maps and looking at regular features that most apps should have and we can take this and we can take this document we can now share it with others we can click on the sharing tool and we can send it as a text we can send it as an email we can send it to evernote we can share it or we can create this as a shared document and allow them to collaborate on the document if we chose so the third really compelling feature that's built into apple notes is the integration between the camera ios and the other in the the operating system and the other tools and features that are built into apple such as the stylus and the markup feature i think we'll wrap things up now and i'll throw it back to you to ask you is are these three basic features the integration with siri the ability to be able to have additional security by locking your notes and the really wonderful camera integration in os level integration that's built into apple notes is are they enough to make you switch your note-taking app to apple notes or to embrace apple notes as your note-taking app of choice and have i missed something is there something that you use apple notes for that you find it a very compelling story that i missed in this particular video please share with me in the comments i would love to know and i would also love to know are you interested in having me do a comparison video between google keep and apple notes a side-by-side comparison because i think they're the two that so many of us are choosing between for this sort of note-taking app again let me know in the comments and with that i need to thank you very much i hope you found today's video to be useful if you did please a like i share and of course a subscribe is always greatly appreciated now before we leave one last thought is every week here at dottotech we host a weekly free tutorial webinar on some aspect of productivity or content creation we call it webinar wednesday as i say they're absolutely free and you are now officially invited till next time i'm steve dotto a fun storm in a castle [Music]

Channel: dottotech

Views: 415,251

Keywords: how to use apple notes, apple notes tutorial, apple notes tips, apple notes tips and tricks, apple notes app, apple notes ipad pro, how to use apple notes on iphone, apple notes tutorial iphone, apple notes ipad, apple notes app tutorial, best note taking app, get more out of apple notes, apple notes tips and tricks 2022, apple notes tutorial 2022, apple notes tutorial ipad, apple notes features, ipad note taking, note taking, siri in apple notes, locking notes

Id: WQ0b6AgNtfc

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Sun May 22 2022