Intro The
Notes app on your iPhone has seen some pretty significant changes and improvements in iOS 17,
so we’re going to cut right to it, and in this video, I’m going to show you everything
new in Notes for your iPhone, so you can get on with getting the most out of it.
Stick with me until the end of this video, as there are some really huge changes here.
OK, let’s get into it.
1 - Monospaced Text is now Monostyled Text In iOS17, Monospaced text has now become
Monostyled text. On a visual level, the only real change here is that the text is slightly smaller,
and now appears against a grey background. But for those of you who code, and I hold my hands up,
that’s not me, my understanding is that you can now write, copy and paste code into Notes without
everything getting messed up, like it used to in the previous iOS, meaning that Monostyled
text can essentially be used as a code block. Note that if you’re copying and pasting in,
you do still have to ensure that you paste into a block of monostyled text, not directly into
the note. Any coders out there who give this a go, leave a comment and let me know if this is
useful to you or not. 2 - Block Quote
iOS17 now offers the option to convert text into a Block Quote style. I’ve found that this works
better when you already have text input, which you then select and convert to Block Quote,
rather than typing text directly into it. So here for example, you can see that I’ve
written out some text, and if I then select it, and tap on the text formatting button,
there’s this new option down at the bottom right of the menu. That’s the Block Quote option,
and selecting that will convert the text that I just selected, into this new visual style.
You can then use other text formatting options within block quote, including monostyled text,
headers, bullets, pretty much anything that you can type in Notes can go into this new format.
3 - Undo Buttons In iOS16, undoing text
that you’ve input is way harder than it needs to be. Typically, I use the shake to undo method, but
this is a bit limited, and doesn’t allow for redo either. This has been fixed thankfully in iOS17,
with both an Undo and a Redo button sitting right at the top of the notes page, available for you to
tap tap any time you need it. 4 - Autofill
If you tap and hold on the screen when writing content into a note, and then scroll through the
contextual menu that appears, you’ll see that one of the options is AutoFill. Tap into that,
and you can then choose to either input the details of someone from your Contacts,
or a Password from your iCloud Keychain, or scan in some text using your iPhone’s camera.
Let’s see how this works with a contact. Once you tap on Contact, you would simply choose the
contact from the list, and tap on the field that you’d like to input. You can see that I can do
this for the contact’s email address, and their phone number, but this should work for anything
that you’ve got stored against the contact. PDF Shoutout
By the way, if you prefer to have content like this in a written format,
there’s a PDF version of this video, complete with screenshots, and you can access it,
along with all other PDFs I’ve created, plus future ones, for just $5 a month. You can either
scan the QR code that you can see on-screen, or follow the link in the description of this
video to learn more. 5 - Add Links
Probably the most significant addition to Notes in iOS17 is a massive improvement to the way in
which you can add links within notes. You can link out to external apps and webpages,
but you can now also easily link to other notes within the app, meaning that you can
easily create directory notes that then link out to other notes. It’s clever stuff, and it’s really
easy to do, once you know what you’re doing. There’s a couple of ways that we can do this.
So let’s say for example, that we’ve got all these breakfast recipes in separate notes,
and we want to create a single note to act as a directory. We’ll create a new note,
and then tap and hold for a second in the body of the note, to get this contextual menu. We’ll
then tap the right arrow to move until we see Add Link. Tap on that, and you can see that we have
this new screen appear. You could paste a link to a webpage or another app in here if you wanted to,
but for this we’re just going to begin typing the name of a note that we’d like to link to.
You can see that Notes shows us possible matches, and we simply tap to select the one that we want.
Notice that by default, when we do it this way, the toggle for ‘Use Note Title as Name’
is selected. We could toggle that off, and then input our own link name if we wanted,
but I’ll leave it as-is for now. I’ll repeat the process again,
to show you how this can work as a kind of directory, creating as many links out to other
notes as you like. Once you’ve created the links, you’d simply tap on one, to take you to that note.
The other way that you can do this is to create the text first. So here,
let’s input some text that we’d like to have for our link. Once you’ve written the text,
you would simply tap and hold on the screen for a moment, then use the cursors to select the text,
and again in the contextual menu that appears, choose Add Link. Again, you would simply type the
name of the note that you’d like to link to, but this time when you select it, you can see that the
name of the link is the text that we wrote, and Use Note Title as Name is toggled off. And just
like before, the link is created. 6 - Better PDF Editing
PDF management and editing was really limited in iOS16, you were essentially
limited to opening the PDF in Quick View, and if you wanted to do much in the way of editing,
you’d need to open it up in an editing tool. Not needed anymore thanks to iOS17, as you can do a
lot with PDFs, right from within the Notes app. So here, we’ve got a PDF in iOS17. First,
notice that if I tap on the downward pointing arrow in the PDF, I can still choose to view
this in Quick Look, like we could in iOS16. But if we jump back to the previous view, you can see
that we can swipe through pages, right within the PDF in Notes, without having to fully open it up.
Also, if I select some text within the PDF, you can see that we have the option to highlight it,
underline it, add strikethroughs, all within the Notes app, without having to open up a
dedicated PDF editor. If we then tap on the ellipsis menu on a specific page of the PDF,
which you can see up at the top of the screen, you’ve got the ability to do things like insert
blank pages, rotate pages, insert pages from Files, you’ve really got quite a
lot of flexibility for how you want to annotate or edit PDFs, right from within the Notes app.
You can even use the Markup tool to markup PDFs right from within Notes,
including adding shapes and your signature if you need to, and thanks to machine learning,
your phone can identify fields that can be filled in, even from scanned PDFs, so I think that for
99% of people, you’re absolutely not going to need to use any kind of third party PDF
editor moving from now on. 7 - Menu Bar Change
A minor one, but when creating a note, the items in the menu bar that appear above the
keyboard have been shifted around a little. Previously you had the Insert Table option,
then text formatting, then checkboxes, whereas now you begin with text formatting, probably the most
commonly used button, then checkbox, then insert table. The rest of this menu remains unchanged.
8 - Stickers In iOS16, you could input stickers,
but you were limited only to the memoji stickers. You would input them by tapping the emoji button
in the keyboard when typing, and then choosing the memoji that you want from in there. In iOS17,
you can still input memojis if you like, but you now have access to all of the
stickers that you can create in iOS in general, so if you’re into stickers,
you might find this useful. 9 - Markup now includes crayon!
Technically not just an inclusion to Notes,
but as markup is something I think people will use a lot in Notes, I’m including it here,
in iOS17, you have the addition of a crayon in the markup tool. You can see that it sits
to the left of the fountain pen in the selection tool, and it actually does a
really good job of making a very satisfying representation of a crayon, as you can see.
10 - Attachment size option In iOS16, if you open a note
with an attachment, you can tap and hold on the attachment and choose to change the size of it.
Note that this doesn’t change the actual file size, rather it changes the size of the preview
on the screen, and I personally find that having a smaller image size looks better on the phone.
In iOS17, you can still do this exactly the same way, but in addition to that, you can tap the
ellipsis menu at the top of the note and choose it from here. The end result is exactly the same,
just an additional way of accessing the option. End
So there you go, those are the changes to Notes in iOS 17. I’m still waiting for Apple
to create an app where they combine Notes, Reminders and Calendar altogether in one,
but in the meantime, I’m pretty happy with the changes they’ve added to notes this year,
and can definitely see myself using it more. What about you,
what changes do you think you’ll get the most out of? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.