A friend of mine sent me a .pages file the other day. Upon receiving the email I said out loud “what in tarnation is a .pages file?”
Apparently that is Apple’s notes app file format. The fact that these companies don’t export to .txt blows my mind - to use a format that you need an apple device to read for a simple note makes me lol.
Luckily there are online tools that allow you to convert the file to text format and it opened fine in emacs. But the fact that a simple note is exported to a proprietary file format so that the average person would have to use an Apple device to read it is mind boggling.
The attempted lock-in is real.
On a side note, Evernote keeps emailing me that I need to update my 2-factor authentication before X date or they are going to delete my account. I have not used the app in about half a decade.
Hey Evernote, I don’t care! Delete my account!
The reason that you need to stop using these note apps is that you have no ability to know if they will be around for the long run.
Even Microsoft’s Onenote garbage, you have NO idea!
So - get yourself a way to keep plain text notes, and that’s all you need.
On those various Synology filesystems #
DON’T USE THEM.
I have had clients lose their data because their NAS failed and the files were encrypted with Synology’s whatever system.
Store your files in a NAS box you control, encrypt them yourself, and save yourself the anguish.
You can then edit your text files if it is 1995 or 2065 in Emacs.