No matter what platform you’re on, you can open a previously-created Quick Note and edit it. When you create a Quick Note, it’s saved in a special section of the Notes app. The one place you won’t find Quick Note capture is on the iPhone. Quick Note can be assigned to Hot Corners on the Mac.

There are also many built-in system apps that would benefit from the sort of tight integration with Quick Note that Safari has implemented but don’t yet. Chief among the feature’s drawbacks is that its capture functionality is nowhere to be found on the iPhone, which is disappointing. As a result, I expect we’ll see many developers support Quick Note this fall.Īlthough Quick Note already works well on the iPad and Mac, there’s still more Apple can do to make it more useful. Even during the beta period, it works with apps I use that haven’t done anything to support it. Some years, Apple introduces interesting new features that I hope will take off, but there’s a lag because they’re based on new technologies that developers don’t or can’t support right away due to compatibility issues with older OS versions. Notes needs work to make it easier to get the information you gather with Quick Note out of the app, but already, there is a long list of apps that support the feature thanks to the wide use of NSUserActivity among developers. Best of all, notes can be linked to their source material in apps that support NSUserActivity, a virtual Swiss Army Knife API that enables a long list of functionality across Apple’s devices. Quick Note can be summoned immediately in a wide variety of ways on both platforms, and your notes are stored where they can be easily found again. This fall, when iPadOS 15 and macOS Monterey are released, Notes will gain a new feature called Quick Note that’s designed to handle this exact scenario. Moreover, the notes you take are completely divorced from their source, losing important context about why you saved something. By the same token, though, a plain text editor doesn’t always fit the bill either, reducing links to raw URLs and often not handling images at all.

You don’t need to fire up a word processor to collect links, images, and text, for example. There is an endless number of apps and automations for collecting information, but I’ve always found that the best options are the lightest weight. Reading, thinking, organizing, and planning come later. This stage is almost always a speed run for me, no matter the context. Whether I’m planning a family trip or preparing to write a story like this one, the first step is research, which starts with collecting information. When I’m researching, speed is essential.

Mac quick note