Status: Ideating
Apple Notes ships on all MacOS and iOS devices, and is a quick way to take notes; I have notes that I took 10+ years ago, that have survived many device upgrades.
Notes has many features that makes it a lightweight knowledge management tool like ability to attach pictures directly from the phone, HTML tables, and most recently - Linking to other notes.
This has me wondering if Notes can be used a lightweight authoring tool for a website. However, notes supports only exporting single note to PDF, and nothing much else.
The first step to this is to export the content into a more web friendly format like HTML (or markdown, whence it can be converted to HTML easily).
The first clue down this road is apple-notes-to-sqlite tool written by @simonw.
The exported [notes] table contains HTML in the body column:
CREATE TABLE [notes] (
[id] TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
[created] TEXT,
[updated] TEXT,
[title] TEXT,
[body] TEXT
);If one can build a MacOS native app that can directly publish the notes as webpages to a hosting service, then we can see the classic Desktop based web publishing make a come back in a small way.
At the least this NotesPublisher should have the following options:
- Select which folders to export
- Select “Home page”
- Some kind of navigation.
See also: yakshaves, sqlite, publishing