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Comment by divbzero | Hacker News Reader

You can connect iOS Notes with any IMAP server. This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio) but does allow for self-hosting.

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This is great until you edit your notes on IMAP from more than one app. Apple Notes, Outlook, Gmail, and others with access to IMAP notes will corrupt one another's entries very easily. Style is also very difficult to control in this setup.

Apple Notes is not intended for people who want to own their data and have control over export

Interesting. Did they add this feature recently? How do you set it up?

Embedded files (photos, video, audio, PDFs, etc.) and bullet hierarchies were the two things that I remember being the most trouble; you can copy bullet hierarchies from iOS Notes and paste them into another app, but they aren’t detected when copying the note via Shortcuts. Embedded files had to be manually saved. I think you could Airdrop notes to a MacOS device, but it would wipe the date created metadata from what I remember.

No, in fact it is available since iOS 4 (2010).

You just connect the account and turn on the notes synchronisation (right below calendar synchronisation).

I wrote python code to extract the notes years ago[1], but it's bit-rotted, so it no longer supports tables, raw stroke data, or the newer features like equations. Maybe I'll update it someday, but I'm not using notes at the moment and have too many other things going one.

https://github.com/dunhamsteve/notesutils

New term to add to the lexicon... bit-rot. I like it.

It’s been there for several years.

I just checked and my google account’s earliest synced note is from 2011. it shows up in the Notes app as a separate section from the iCloud one.

But for some reason the action center quick note create button doesn't work when your default notes account is not iCloud.

Which PM comes up with this? And what does a developer thing when they implement this?

> This supports a reduced feature set (no embedded images, tables, or audio)

Just tested and embedded images do seem to be supported?

("insert photo" -> add photo -> photo is stored as a MIME part on the note)

And no formatting whatsoever.

I really wish Apple would revisit third-party server support with something more modern, such as a Markdown + file hosting backend (over WebDAV or whatever they currently consider the cool way of file sharing), but I'm not holding my breath.

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