It seems like the WWDC keynote was only yesterday. Well, it was, but I’ve been playing with iOS17 ever since, and found numerous little things that were not spoken about in the keynote, so I thought I’d point them out here. Also, I need to sleep now.
Notes
Listen, I love Apple notes, but there are a few things that are lacking to make it great. Unfortunately, Apple never seemed interested in its stock apps until the last few updates, and Notes once again gets quite a few teaks in iOS17.
They spoke about PDFs and improvements to mark up, but Apple Notes also features the ability to link notes together. It’s not quite the double square bracket easy linking that modern notes apps seem to love, but it helps bring some PKM style linking to the best notes app on your iPhone.
Also improved is the ease of selecting styling options, with everything available under a floating add button. I’d like to see adding a link available here too because using the text selection options is a little awkward, but at least things like indenting and font styling are easier to get to. There’s even less reason to use anything else.
Reminders
Apple mentioned interactive widgets on iPadOS17, and thankfully they are also in iOS17. The Reminders one shown piqued my interest to see if there were any other improvements, and thankfully there are. Reminders has always lacked that little something to really snatch usage away from to do apps, but this might tip a few over the edge.
The stock Reminders app now features the ability to add in sections to your lists and also manage them in a Kanban style. Of course, they never call it that, but the ‘columns’ layout found behind the three dots reveals the same functionality. The ease of adding and editing columns needs some work, but this style of to do management could remove a lot of reliance on third-party apps.
Once again, the iOS update is nothing revolutionary, it introduced lots of little updates that will improve usage. I keep stumbling upon little tweaks that should really help me, so I will keep posting them – follow me through activity pub greg@gr36.com.