Transcript
Micah Sargent (0:00)
Coming up on iOS today, Rosemary Orchard, and I, Micah Sargent, take some notes apps and make them compete with each other. Stay tuned.
Unknown (0:11)
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Micah Sargent (0:15)
This is Twit. This is iOS Today, episode 738 with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, February 4, 2025, for Thursday, February 6, 2025. Notes Apps Showdown. Hello, and welcome to another episode of iOS today. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent, and I.
Rosemary Orchard (0:44)
Am another one of your hosts, Rosemary Orchard. And I am really happy that when I suggested this topic to Micah, going through some notes apps and giving things a little bit of a showdown, that he was like, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's talk about this, because we all have little things that we need to note down here and there. You know, I have some of my little, little favorites, like the one I was using this weekend called Cheat Sheet, which is a great little app. That's my iPad. This is a great app for just popping up things like your hotel room number and writing those down and things like that. So, yeah, there's. There's all sorts of things, though I wouldn't necessarily. I don't know. Maika, would you call Cheat Sheet a notes application? Or would you say it's more of a reference app?
Micah Sargent (1:30)
It's like a notes utility or something? Yeah, it's not quite a full app, so to speak. It's great for syncing little bits of data between devices. But, yeah, you don't really take full notes in it. Right. And it doesn't have a lot of the features that kind of make a notes app. I think what makes a notes app, which is being able to format text a little bit and being able to, you know, make. Make some. Some level of. Of utility, some level of. Of feature that kind of takes what would just be plain text and helps you to kind of. I don't know that Cheat Sheet is necessarily for that, but it is certainly an augmentation to your notes app, for sure.
Rosemary Orchard (2:12)
Yeah. So I'm just going to kind of go a little rogue and talk about Cheat Sheet for a second because it does have some formatting options. But the reason why I like Cheat Sheet is it's great for, like, just noting down, hey, hotel room was like, for this weekend. I've just come back from a trip. I was in room 106, and that was on floor one, and that was, you know, and so just being able to note that down and then being able to say, hey, you know what I'm going to do I am going to add a little widget to my home screen screen and just pop that in there because sometimes you do just want like a virtual sticky note. And so I can pop that in there and then I can see select a particular folder, for example. Or I could add a different kind of widget and I'll just scroll down and show everyone all the options for Cheat Sheet. So that's the lists and then there's an action widget and then there's a little solo widget. And so if I select a solo widget, I can select my cheat. And there we go. So I've now got my hotel room and now I can even just make that bigger if I wanted to, if I had lots of information in there. So that can be quite nice for, you know, various things at, you know, particular times of the year or something where you don't want to be opening apps all the time. But, you know, the, the main Notes app that I think most people know and love and want to be using a lot, or at least end up using a lot, just because it's one of those defaults is Notes. And Notes has had some really great improvements in iOS 18 with things like Math Notes. Uh, so, you know, in Math Notes, you can create a new Math Note and then you can actually go ahead. Oops, that was writing tools. And you can, you can write out, you know, your equations. So one plus one equals. And then it should come up with. There we go, two. It's even written it in my handwriting. Um, now hopefully I could get to one plus one equals two by myself. But the advantage of Math Notes is you don't necessarily have to now say, I was in a math class and my buddy Maika is also in that math class. And we decide that what we're going to do is we're going to do collaborative note taking, which just to point out some folks, this is not cheating. This is actually really smart. It's working together where you take notes at the same time and then somebody can add a comment that says, I didn't understand this, and somebody else can pop in and respond with, you know, try explaining it further so that you all get a complete, not transcript of your class, but you get a collective notes collection from your class or classes. So what you can do is you can of course find endnote, but what I was trying to do is tap on the share sheet and then I could tap on this little share and send that over to Micah and then add him to that note or something else I could do If I wanted to, would be to create a new folder of shared notes. And I'll put that as with Micah, just so that I remember this for later. And then in my shared notes with Micah, I can actually share a whole folder and send that whole folder over to Micah, so Micah can create other notes in there himself. And then I'll get to see those as well. And you can share these with a group of people, which is really nice. Some Eagle Eye faults might have spotted that. I have a wish list in my Notes folders. Yeah, that is Wish Lists, Family wish lists, where we all put our wish lists in there. And yeah, it means that everybody's got access to all of the wishes that anybody might like. So if there's gifts that need to be purchased, well, if you had something that you particularly wanted, my family tends to write that down and share that. So Notes has a whole bunch of formatting options, which is, you know, fairly simple, but it's. It's not overly simple. So you've got the option to format things as a title, headings, subheadings, and so on. You can have checklists. So if you wanted to, then you can have multiple items. And then you can even have it so that when you check things off in the options, then it will give you the ability to have things automatically move to the bottom, should you. To do that, which is always nice there. You can now put tables in, which is very nice. So if you need things, if you want attachments, you can add an attachment, including recording audio. So going back to those shared class notes I was talking about earlier, if you're sitting in a class, the professor's talking, somebody, preferably somebody sitting close to the front, if you're doing this collaboratively, can record the audio, and then you can play back the audio, and you can see the notes appear in real time with the trans. With the audio that's being recorded. And the. That could be a transcript. You can also do things like attach files. So if you've got your slides from a class or, you know, a picture of a receipt that when you're on a business trip, for example, then you've got all those options, and you can add little drawings in there as well. So I could try to add maybe a little heart. No, I'm not the world's best artist, and I'm doing this with my finger on my iPhone, so give me a little credit for that, please. And then you also have writing tools, so you can have it do things like proofreading and rewriting and make making Something more friendly or professional or concise, transforming things into tables, etc, using Apple Intelligence. If you have Apple Intelligence and you would like to do that. And yeah, Notes is just a really great little app. It's got lots of shortcut support, it's got widget support, it's got sharing support. There's so much inside of it that it's just really, it's a very solid basic app to have on your iPhone or iPad.