My most important feature on any Apple device, ever!
To those who aren‘t in the know — Apple just pestered us with iOS/iPadOS 15. Really nice things for those of us who are using their iPhones or iPads for work. Plenty of new additions like Live Text or a plethora of widgets.
But the single most important feature, for me (sorry for the qualifier, still necessary given that I’m most certainly not the centre of the universe) is Quick Note.
You haven’t seen Quick Note in action? Well, imagine a device which lets you attach your personal notes to whatever you’re doing in entirely different apps. Like, just to name one, Fantastical. Which offers a Quick Note integration.
Meaning — you can easily link a note to an appointment. Or a task. An Email. A Website. A document. And, to make things really, really useful — you can morph this note into a collaborative note. Granted, you have to have the same OS running (and in most cases even the same apps) on all devices with the people you’ve chosen to collaborate with.
On that note, I really, truly would appreciate for Apple to finally not rely on Exchange Active Sync for, well, Exchange things. EWS is available, all things considered, but apparently Apple is working on Graph API for connecting to Office365 in the future — whenever that may surface.
Quick Note, since that’s what, I think, is the single most important feature of not only the i-devices, but macOS Monterey as well, has at least the potential to enable anyone using a Mac or any iDevice to connect various bits from any app to any other item in any other app in a simple, intuitive way. Connecting information regardless what apps you’re using, backlinking to the apps connected to them and unobtrusively reminding you of all those connections as soon as you’re opening that specific thing.
Curiously, as far as I know, the thing Apple is using to offer this feature is something every iOS developer should be utterly familiar with: Handoff, which in turn uses NSUserActivity API.
Exact the same thing is happening with Quick Note. It doesn’t use the famous x-callback-url scheme, which we now, love, and hate at the very same time, but gets the application’s state at the time you created that note. And that, dear readers, is genius. Because of Quick Note suggestions — a quirky name for an elementary feature you’ll come to love when using it.
Suppose I revisit an email I earlier connected to a Quick Note you’ll see a tiny hovering note in a corner, visually reminding you about the note you took earlier. That’s a Quick Note suggestion. Open that hovering note, and you can access all the other stuff you placed into that note.
Now, it’s not perfect and works best on iPad. Even the latest macOS 12 Beta seems quite undecided if Quick Note is supported or not. But then, ist IS a beta, after all. I truly hope Apple will mature this stuff, and fast. Believe it or not, this is truly my most awaited feature, ever. For further information, switch over to the recording of the Quick Note session for WWDC21
