I really hate to be positive so early on a Monday morning, but I have something “nice” to say: Apple’s Notes app is good. It does everything you’d want a notes app to do, and does it simply, intuitively and seamlessly across devices.
Perhaps I can dim the glare of this sun shininess by throwing some much-deserved shade, starting with Apple.
Apple Notes is one of the few remaining things in the deteriorating Apple ecosystem about which we can still say “it just works,” but I’m sure Apple is hard at work figuring out ways to force Notes into service peddling content subscriptions. Within a year Notes will be bloated with Apple Music, TV and Fitness features that make it unfit for anything.
Second, it should be noted that this is yet another example of Apple stealing the concept of one of its partners, refining it and giving it away for free. In this case, the victim is Evernote, the reigning Enshittifacation World Champion, who, for more than a decade has refused to finish dying its slow, gruesome death by morbid scope obesity and exorbitant subscription prices. Hopefully, Apple Notes will finish the job, and end its miserable existence.
That’s the right note to end on. Enjoy your Monday and the week looming before you.
Side note: my wife is trying to trick me into making Design Grouch into a Youtube or Instagram channel.
Of course, she’s already trying to dilute my grouchiness concept by encouraging occasional “positive” episode. This morning’s positivity outburst got her all excited that I could actually like something, and she took it as evidence that maybe emotional rage, which normally spans fury and resigned loathing, might extend into something resembling approval.
“Can’t you do a positive post every now and then?” she asks. But I did write another positive post before this one. Two seems excessive, given the sorry state of design. But if that weren’t enough, I even have a whole category dedicated to positivity.
But if I stick to maintaining a positive-to-negative post ratio that reflects real-world competence-to-incompetence, I project my next positive post will drop somewhere around late 2032 or early to mid-2033.
