Publishing Apple Notes as a Website

Exploring way to export Apples notes as a website

Created: by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Mar 31, 2024 Tagged: notes · apple

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:

  1. Select which folders to export
  2. Select “Home page”
  3. Some kind of navigation.

See also: yakshaves, sqlite, publishing