Accidental Tech Podcast576: Quiet Little Leech
https://atp.fm/576
The cancelation of Apple's car project, excitement for potential AI applications, the wonders of email clients, and starting a car in fifth gear.
popbones@atpfm RE Apple Notes export, I've been looking into this recently myself. There are several projects and scripts on this. Most of them are focusing on the texts, non of then support full interpretation/rendering of the notes content as far as I know. There's even a service that can publish your shared notes to a web page.
Luckily, we are not far from it. In the SQLite database, notes content are stored as gzipped binary. The binary itself is actually protobuf serialisation of the note.
@atpfm The main schema is something Apple defined and is called Topotext. There are seperate schema for tables, a custom CRDT stuff.
It's easy enough to extract textual part from it. But without a schema, it's hard to parse more complex data.
Luckily, not sure if this by accident or good faith, one can find the proto files in the JavaScript.
I haven't have time to work on this yet, but it is not that hard to parse most of the note data convert into a format you desire for archive purposes.
@atpfm I guess the CRDT for tables, and on top of that, sketches might be a bit complicated if you want to convert it to a format that reversible so you can somehow put them back and edit them. But I for archival, it shouldn't be a problem.
@atpfm Also, if anyone is interested, the general structure of the note content is a sequence of "AttributedString", I imagine similar to that in AppKit/UIKit.
An instance of AttributeString has a pure string value and a list of Attribute spans specify what Attributes a part of the string has via range indexes.
Even when Apple introduced links to notes in the last version, this general structure wasn't changed, it's just a link attribute point to a deep link of the note specified by ID.
@atpfm Even though, it's not a feature in the Note app, but you can point to a folder you notes as well.
The URL schemas are:
- applenotes:note/{noteid}
- applenotes:folder/{folderid}
(If I didn't remember wrong)
@atpfm By the way, I think if you do the takeout, Apple probably would just give you rtfd version of your notes.
The main problem with that is checklists would be converted to simple bulletin lists.
I think I did it a couple of years back. Don't remember the exact details and can't find the file 😂. But there's probably nothing good otherwise I'd do that regularly.