There's a lot of things in this article that I agree with whole heartedly. A few weeks ago I posted this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650908 which shares some of the same frustrations.
Another thing that annoys me right now (and this is a problem of my own making...) is earlier this year I started taking notes with an app on my iPad called Notability. It works great with the logitech crayon stylus/pencil and is useful for jotting down notes when doing online courses etc.
Except I've shot myself in the foot a bit because those notes are now bound to the app. Yes there is the Notability app for OSX, and yes I should have anticipated this problem sooner, but that's beside the point, my notes are locked into the Notability ecosystem. They support this half assed solution to export them as RTF files or PDFs but you lose stuff like handwriting recognition.
One project on my TODO list is to see if I can reverse engineer the proprietary Notability file format, which includes the text recognition and all the things needed to render the lines that make up your notes. I know there have been attempts to do this e.g. https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notabili... I just need to put the time aside to make it work
Something I would like is to be able to add simple metadata to photos on my phone (then somehow or other I can store them sensibly on dropbox/icloud) The basic idea is "receipt for travel" so I can file them easily
I know I can use concur and ten thousand different apps but FFS I dont need to.
On a slightly related note: I searched “paper” and “receipt” in the latest version of iOS photos and was impressed with the results. Combined with date range and location, it should be possible to find a specific receipt fairly quickly.
What about when Apple decides to change things up or get rid of that feature? In my opinion, you don't really fully own your data until you own the software you use to interact with it.
Oh I very much agree. A similar user interface running on self-hosted data would be ideal. I just suspect to get it used by everyone the experience would have to come close to what the Photos app delivers.
Yep. Ideally it feels that this kind of thing should be solved on file system level (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_file_attributes), but the current situations with the zoo of file systems on different devices/operating systems is a mess. Let alone the fact that it's not cloud sync friendly.
Evernote was good for this ― by recognising text in images and by adding text and tags to notes (IIRC they have a whole app for receipts and such things).
But Evernote gradually turned to trash by neglecting basic functionality like text editing and adding bugs with each release.
And one more thing was why doesn't my browser store my history - it just the URLs of where I have been but the html, the images, the text etc. Then let me search that.
Someone raised this on here a few weeks ago and it was a gobsmacking moment - my hand flew to my forehead and I realised yes - that would be so useful but the big tech firms find it more profitable to have that data on their hard drives not mine.
If you are using Firefox, you can set the history storage period to centuries, search history in the URL bar (or History page) or when Firefox is closed query the places.sqlite database in your profile:
sqlite3 ~/.mozilla/firefox/profile/places.sqlite 'SELECT title, url FROM moz_places WHERE url LIKE "%mozilla.com"'
apple's own notes app similarly screwed me over. they apparently changed file formats with ios/ipados 13 so that the existing pencil drawings on my ipad pro were "rasterized" during the upgrade from ios 12 (they're no longer easily editable). they also removed features like zooming in/out for no discernable reason.
edit: also meant to say that exporting the drawings only gives you raster images.
Another thing that annoys me right now (and this is a problem of my own making...) is earlier this year I started taking notes with an app on my iPad called Notability. It works great with the logitech crayon stylus/pencil and is useful for jotting down notes when doing online courses etc.
Except I've shot myself in the foot a bit because those notes are now bound to the app. Yes there is the Notability app for OSX, and yes I should have anticipated this problem sooner, but that's beside the point, my notes are locked into the Notability ecosystem. They support this half assed solution to export them as RTF files or PDFs but you lose stuff like handwriting recognition.
One project on my TODO list is to see if I can reverse engineer the proprietary Notability file format, which includes the text recognition and all the things needed to render the lines that make up your notes. I know there have been attempts to do this e.g. https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/03/31/reverse-engineering-notabili... I just need to put the time aside to make it work