I am consistently shocked at how bad Apple Notes is. I like the features it has and I like the iCloud sync between devices... I use it daily. But it's so damn buggy. It's a notes app! Why do new lines on a moderately-long note cause half the text to disappear until I hit the carriage return a few times?
I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.
I think apple cares a lot less than it used to and it’s been like that for a while. There are long standing bugs or missing features on iOS that are just there and have been for years.
I guess they don’t have to try as hard anymore, so they don’t.
It feels like they are spread way too thin, and individual teams are not allowed to improve their app/services/parts on their own. If I had to work on Apple Notes I would have several suggestions, not all worthy of work of-course, but letting a lot of apps go stagnant is something else entirely.
Apple used to have to roll-their-own to hedge their bets. For example, Safari and iWork came about when there was a possibility that Microsoft would pull support for IE and Office for Mac.
Still need people to press buttons though. But I feel too many decisions have to go through a tiny set of people. But I have no insights into the org. I do wish they would do more smaller releases. Like update Notes without a full OS update.
When they're making billions from their cut on app store sales and receiving billions from Google to do nothing, and people buy their devices anyway, why would Apple care?
If people keep buying your devices anyway it's feedback to the company management that the customers aren't bothered and you can keep doing what you're doing, so there's no reason to change anything. It's the PRO of being a monopoly and a money printer.
The more you rely on abstracted (and sometimes leaky) tools—like Swift versus Objective-C, or SwiftUI versus its predecessors—the more likely you are to feel helpless when something goes wrong.
I think the fact it's buggy but you still use it daily (when there are so many other options) goes to show how good it is! Personally it's the app I use more than any other. I don't run in to too many issues but I have experienced the one you mention about text disappearing. On Mac there are also some really annoying issues with the dictionary (sometimes it lets me 'learn' a work, other times no option) and grammar checks (completely wrong).
>> I also wish it simply converted copied text to plaintext by default rather than trying to preserve formatting.
Isn't this the default behaviour in all rich text apps? I think CMD+SHFT+OPTION+V pastes without preserving formatting.
I find that combination very annoying to press personally. It's possible to change the hotkey by going to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts ... > App Shortcuts, and then under 'All Applications' adding a shortcut for the menu title 'Paste and Match Style' (I suppose it would be different if the OS language is not set to English).
I agree with the person you are responding to though, I would really prefer if 'match style' was the default OS-wide, and there was an option to preserve formatting with a hotkey instead.
I wonder if younger people are aware of keyboard shortcuts? Growing up using primarily phones and tablets it might be less of a thing. I saw a TikTok recently explaining copy/paste shortcuts like it was a hack and people were amazed in the comments.
I wouldn't say it's "damn buggy" — I use Notes daily, and have a significant number of notes that are synced between devices. In my notes I use rich formatting, embed videos, voice memos and lots of images. It handles it really well. I even use iCloud Collaboration feature on a few notes for planning, and for splitting regular expenses
I have three notes that exhibit the bug you mention though: the three notes I keep for each of my children's artwork. I scan the artwork using the document scanning tool in Notes, and it gets embedded as a multi-page PDF (if the artwork itself has multiple parts) or a single PDF. After many years of adding high-res scans, when I scroll to the bottom of these files it takes some time for the note to render. I think I picked the wrong tool for the job here, more than anything!
Seems to be the way with lots of apps Apple produces these days. They do the bare minimum, leave them a decade then quietly add in a feature that should've existed on day one and likely took a single dev a couple of hours to add support for.
It is really incredible how Apple has obviously broken and buggy UX in many primary use cases on their devices, and fail to fix it for generations.
The iPad is particularly bad in this respect. For a decade it would not support the most obvious use case for a device like this: Have it in portrait mode like a notebook, show a video or book app on the top half and notes app on the bottom half. A use case that was solved by the original Macintosh. The most infuriating thing was that you could split the vertical screen into two useless, thing vertical strips---a configuration I have never seen any use case for. Even today now that there is some more configurability and you can vaguely put two apps in this configuration, there is still massive wasted space on the sides and the apps overlap.
What differentiates this from Open WebUI? How did you design the RAG pipeline?
I had a project in the past where I had hundreds of PDF / HTML files of industry safety and fatality reports which I was hoping to simply "throw in" and use with Open WebUI, but I found it wasn't effective at this even in RAG mode. I wanted to ask it questions like "How many fatalities occurred in 2020 that involved heavy machinery?", but it wasn't able to provide such broad aggregate data.
Ultimately, the quality of OCR on PDF is where we are bottlenecked as an industry. And not just in text characters but understanding and feeding to the LLM structured object relationships as we see in tables and graphs. Intuitive for a human, very error prone for RAG.
That's a real issue, but that's masking some of the issues further downstream, like chunking and other context-related problems. There are some clever proposals to make this work, including some of the stuff from Anthropic and Jina. But as far as I can tell, these haven't been tested thoroughly because everyone is hung up at the OCR step (as you identified).
For my purposes, all of the data was also available in HTML format, so the OCR wasn't a problem. I think the issue is the RAG pipeline doesn't take the entire corpus of knowledge into its context when making a response, but uses an index to find one or more relevant documents that it believes are relevant, then uses that small subset as part of the input.
I'm not sure there's a way to get what a lot of people want RAG to be without actually training the model on all of your data, so they can "chat with it" similar to how you can ask ChatGPT about random facts about almost any publicly available information. But I'm not an expert.
I've also observed this issue and I wonder where the industry is on it. There seem to be a lot of claims that a given approach will work here, but not a lot of provably working use cases.
Gemini models run in the cloud, so there is no issue with hardware.
The EU regulations typically include delegated acts, technical standards, implementation standards and guidelines. With Gemini 2.0 we are able to just throw all of this into the model and have it figure out.
This approach gives way better results than anything we are able to achieve with RAG.
My personal bet is that this is how the future will look like. RAG will remain relevant, but only for extremely large document corpuses.
> Regarding iOS, they have made some progress in adopting webpush, but it does not seem possible to push for mobile applications with it yet.
This is a key point right at the very end. It has always been much easier to implement push notifications to Android devices, even when only Web Push is implemented.
Google has been the main force behind the adoption of PWAs as Native apps on devices, even by immediately showing a "Install this app?" popup when navigating to a PWA-enabled website/web app.
iOS permits "Installing to home screen" but there is no popup shown natively, nor any indication from the OS that the website you're visiting is a PWA. The user has to go through several steps to add the app to his device.
Once it is added, it's possible for the device to receive web push notifications and show them as native push notifications (IIRC), even with the app is closed, however the reliability is inconsistent. Sometimes you get them, sometimes you don't. At least that was my experience still about 6 months ago when I tried implementing web push with PWA for iOS.
I gave up trying to go the pure PWA route and instead wrapped my web app with PWABuilder into a native app, and went through the whole process of submitting to the App Store, getting APN, registering the web app in Firebase, then sending the push notifications to the native app via Firebase Messaging. Works great then, but it's a lot more work than keeping everything simply as a web app and using web push.
Web push is basically useless because Google hasn't prioritized fixing the issues causing Android to delay the notifications by 10 minutes or more. They are basically only useful for "re-engagement" spam, nothing time critical.
When did you manage to get that? I tried signing up for the ARM server several times but it always says it's unavailable at the moment in my region (East - Toronto) and I should try a different region... however you can't switch regions after you set up your account. I talked to their support and they said it's unavailable for the foreseeable future... choose a different configuration.
Are people still able to provision those instances in other regions? If so, which one(s)? I'm just using the legacy free one for now, the 2GHz AMD with 0.5GB RAM.
You’d need to upgrade the account to a paid one (there will be no charges anyway if you stay within free limits of the ARM offer), which unlocks a different pool to spin up a server in.
From what I can tell you need to be lucky. When I register my (European) account there are ARM resources left and they were easy to claim. I think I was lucky because they just expanded a data center somewhere nearby, though, I think there was info about it on a Reddit post somewhere.
I don't think the forever-free tier allows cross region instances. You may just need to register an account in another region where they have more resources, but it's anyone's guess where Oracle still has them.
It's a neat playground but as should be blatantly obvious it's not worth investing too much time into, because they can make it disappear without recourse for no reason without warning.
You know those guys? My friend and I used to come to tears to these during the old DubToons days. It's the only reason I know what a Middlesborough accent is. We still quote them!
