TECHNOLOGY | APPLE | WRITING
From Apple Notes to Polished Pages: Unleashing Your Writing Process with Style and Grace!
How the new Apple Notes features save hours, nerves and writers from despair
Apple’s Sonoma, iOS, and iPadOS 17 are still warm from the oven. The reception has been mostly lukewarm and a little bored. Those new features seem not that sexy on the first look.
But wait. There is more.
As a writer, I was drawn to the Apple Notes and its engagement ring with Apple Pages. Apple announced this relationship without much fanfare and fuss.
Was the bride already with a child, the Puritan in me asked, or why this announcement came with so little attention?
And indeed, the pair was heavily pregnant with a great promise of what looked like a love child.
I’ll explain to you why, so don’t judge them before you have read the whole story. Below is an illustration of what you can expect.
The process of writing should be so easy that you just write despite it — starting from gathering information easily
I have for years followed this (call it common sense) approach when I start writing.
When I get the idea for an article, the first thing for me is to gather as much information as possible about the topic. Now, in the golden dawn of AI, I use ChatGPT and other AI tools with the good old uncle Google to surface information for me.
The problem has been where to store that information.
I have links, snippets from websites, quotes from books and illustrations, etc. Last year, when Apple Notes came with the capability of external links, I moved from my old note-taking app to Apple Notes. But still, I had to keep the old ones for some tasks like building structures within the app.
Apple Notes was good but not perfect — like a horny teenager: a big promise, but a bit awkward. The first kiss hit the jaw more than the lips if you get my meaning. And the tongue was more in the ear than in the cheek.
No internal links, but the tags were OK. Organising things wasn’t that fancy, even with the smart folders. However, Apple Notes has matured and is now a pretty handsome devil. It links, winks and frees your thoughts to run wild.
After the first trial, I loved the new Apple Notes.
Within days, I dumped every other note-taking app, and Apple Notes is now the hub of my content and resource gathering.
It has tags; it can handle internal links between notes and bring external links into the flow. It has a streamlined PDF attachments system and an overall sleek UX.
It’s a blessing. Finally. Now, I can gather rather than scatter my background research.
Then comes the time when I need to grasp the essence of it
Writing articles requires speed, focus, and forgetting the format until you know your message. You have to grasp the essence of the idea you want to put in words.
What is your point? That’s the question. The Hamletian agony comes much later.
After digesting all the background information, you need to connect two dots: what is in it for the reader — and what is your take on that?
Your job is to build the high-tension wire of words so the reader can walk from their expectations to your conclusions. The farther apart those dots are, the more likely the reader will fall and never come to your conclusions (tautology intended). So, make sure there are some resting points where the reader can take a deep breath and not have the vertigo of your abysmal thoughts.
With Apple Notes, I can nest my thought process, linking background information and the skeletal scribbles of my idea. I can clarify the main points and then see if I need to add something in between to ease the tightrope walk of the reading experience.
I can then see when I have grasped the bigger picture and how it is framed, like saving a caterpillar from a spider web and ensuring the birth of the butterfly of your thoughts to flutter around.
Then comes the fun part: grafting the butterfly
AppleNotes allows you to continue with your caterpillars without thinking about any formatting. You just write because you now know the context, your points and the overall frame of the story. You graft the message.
I often let my keyboard loose. Let’s see what comes up because I know my audience’s expectations (or I think I know), and I know my take on the points I make.
The story takes shape. It starts to have structure. It starts to breathe. And if you are lucky, the butterfly is beautiful when opening its wings for the first time, and you read through what you have written.
Don’t be discouraged if it is at first just a dull moth and not a rare Blue Morpho. You can repeat the process as long as the beauty is there without the beastly word processors. You have not spent time on useless formatting and fiddling with the word processor’s mediocre mechanics.
Grafting your content with AppleNotes helps you to focus and keep your eye on the butterfly and not chase some app settings.
For example, this whole story has been conceived with Apple Notes — and the beauty of the process is that the steps and sub-notes build me a growing repository of valuable material for later use. I use Tiago Forte’s PARA method, and with my 4G writing process, I have now streamlined every step of the way. It is a simple yet efficient way to keep things in place and not lose those evocative threads of small thoughts, ideas and questions.
With AppleNotes, you find your way — and your thoughts when you need them, even if you sometimes go astray.
The credo of creation is then grooming the bride.
Your butterfly is ready to fly to a world you can groom to please the eyes of the readers when they come to the wedding party of your labour of love.
If AppleNotes is your young (and responsible) groom, the Apple Pages is the bride. It is a bit older than AppleNotes, but in this creative marriage, it has the maturity to handle whatever you throw from AppleNotes to it.
The capability to open Pages directly from AppleNotes is a brilliant yet simple feature that saves time and speeds up the process.
Pages is a great word processor; you can design decent-looking everyday documents with it. Its layout tools are easy, and a comprehensive set of typographic controls and straightforward photo and illustration manipulation tools give you creative control if you want to pimp up your document.
So, now you have it — my 4G steps to easier content creation.
As said, it is mainly common sense, but unfortunately, word processors and note-taking apps have mostly forgotten that ancient principle. Now, Apple has listened to how caterpillars are born and transformed into butterflies in the silence of the writer’s mind.
- Gather
- Grasp
- Graft
- Groom
The simple yet powerful flow from Notes to Pages is a delight, and they save not only time but money because I don’t need to pay subscription fees for convoluted apps and platforms to get my writing done.
If you are a Mac user, give it a go.
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