Notes is one of the most improved apps in iOS 18, yet most people still use it for text only. Let’s have a closer look to see all the different things you can do with Notes on the iPhone, and a tiny peek of what you can do with the Mac version of Notes too.
There are thousands of third-party developers that continually innovate and release amazing new software apps and programs for the entire Apple product line. On the iPhone, there are thousands of games, let alone anything else, and many of them are quite worthy of your leisure time. What tends to get forgotten in our zeal for the latest and greatest is that many of the built-in applications on Apple devices continually receive updates and upgrades. Sometimes, they get entirely new feature sets and significantly greater capabilities, but few outlets share that news because, frankly, it’s less glamorous than cool new stuff.
I have been a part of the Apple ecosystem since the beginning (my first Apple computer was an Apple IIgs, and I had an iPhone 1 and a first gen Apple Watch), so I do keep an eye on the evolution of all of these different apps and utilities. And just as Microsoft keeps updating its core apps and windows, Apple also updates and improves all of its built-in apps. Often without any notice, leaving us to discover the features.
Shortcuts: Basics | Floating Toolbar | To-Do Lists | Image Playground | AI Writing Tools
As a result, I thought it would be fun to dig around in the Notes app to see what’s new. Worth mentioning is that I am running iOS 18.2 beta 3, and I am also part of the Apple Intelligence beta program, so have access to all of those AI utilities too. You’ll see what I mean. Let’s go…
NOTES BASICS: MY SHOPPING LIST
While it’s possible to use Notes to write documents and create complex multimedia materials, my most common use for it is actually to track my shopping list. I find it quite convenient to have it synchronized via iCloud so that I can add entries on my Mac, or on my iPhone, and know that they’re in sync. That way, I can also go through the list while I’m in the supermarket. Here’s my basic shopping list as it stands today:
It’s pretty straightforward. Noticed that some things are capitalized, and other things are not. More importantly, notice the formatting and control toolbar that’s above the suggestion bar that is itself above the keyboard. Yes, there’s a lot going on in modern iOS app interfaces.
Going left to right, the formatting toolbar offers text formatting, to-do list creation, table creation, attachments, drawing tools, and AI writing tools. There are more tools, accessible once you highlight a word, phrase, or section.
Let’s start with text formatting. A tap on the “Aa” button reveals:
This is useful, but it will apply to the next thing that I enter into my note. Instead, I’m going to double tap on a word to select it, which also brings up the tool tip “floating” toolbar.
COOL FEATURES IN THE FLOATING TOOLBAR
In what I consider a bit of a poor interface design decision, compared to the elegance of the overall iOS experience, there are a lot of things stuck into the tiny little floating toolbar that can be hard to find. With text selected, here’s what I see:
I’ll tap on the “>” to see the next set of options for this floating toolbar…
And again…
And one more time.
There are even more entries on the floating toolbar if I just keep tapping on the “>”, but this is enough to hopefully pique your interest. Next time you see the toolbar, go through all of the different options to see what’s available. It’s a lot!
Now, back to our text formatting. Since we have the word “Risotto” selected any formatting selected will actually be applied to that word.
It’s easy to choose a highlight color, I’ll choose blue, to make sure that this particular word stands out in my note. We’ll see the result momentarily.
FUN WITH TO-DO (BULLET) LISTS
One of the more interesting things about Notes is that it recognizes that people often create interactive content, so a simple bullet list actually ends up being a to-do checklist. I’m going to select all of the items on my shopping list and then tap on the to-do list icon on the toolbar. Here’s what happens:
Noticed that the word Risotto is now in blue. When the selection box vanishes, you’ll also notice that its background has become blue too, but that’s overridden by the yellow selection at this point. Tap twice on one of the circles adjacent to an entry and you’ll see how it’s a to-do list, not a bullet list. Nifty, eh?
Instead of creating a to-do list, how about if I select a few words and then tap the tiny grid to create a table? Here’s what happens:
Here you can see the blue-on-blue formatting glory of our Risotto. More importantly there’s a lot you can do with these tables. In this instance it’s a really slick interface: tap on the three dots on the left to create more rows or apply formatting, tap on the three dots on the upper right to create more columns.
I don’t think I actually want a table here, however, so I’m going to use the left pointing curved arrow at the very top to undo my most recent formatting step. Notes has a great undo feature so you can experiment all you like and back up to the original format of your note. Very helpful if you’re exploring these new features.
PLAYING WITH IMAGE PLAYGROUND
One of the new features that is part of Apple Intelligence is what the company calls Image Playground. The idea is that it is an AI-powered image creation tool with lots of guard rails to ensure people get great results. It’s actually quite fun to play with! How do you get to it in Notes? Tap on the paper clip icon.
As you can see, there are a lot of options here for attaching things to a Note. Notice that you can add photos to a note, attach separate files, even record an audio snippet. Lots of flexibility. Since I am running the very latest version of iOS 18, I also see Image Playground. When I tap on it, here’s what occurs:
What’s happened here is that Notes has given Image Playground all the words from my note, and it’s decided that three of them are suitable as keywords for the AI image creation process. The result is rather strange and I am confident I would not want to eat risotto cereal salad, but it certainly visually interesting.
You can add more details by entering more information into the “describe an image” box. Image Playground also creates multiple versions of an image. In the above you can see that this is image two of five possibilities that it created with the prompt words salad, risotto, cereal.
I’m going to specify “in a shopping cart” with the hope that that will change the images of the foods into images of the foods in packaging as I might find at a supermarket:
It does not. In fact, it’s a rather odd image, but at least it does have some amusement value. In terms of my shopping list, this probably isn’t a very helpful addition.
I can use my own art skills by leaving Image Playground to go back to the main view of my note, then tapping on the pencil icon.Now, with my great artistic skill, I will draw a banana:
You can see along the bottom that there are different styles of pens, and the ability to have a ruler displayed, and a handy pallet of different colors. With a little bit of practice, you can probably do better with your bananas than I did with mine. Nonetheless, it is pretty fun, and it could be entertaining to create a shopping list where you only use pictures, instead of words.
Or you can use that undo button to get rid of your artistic creation, which is in fact what I’m going to do.
MORE AI: WRITING TOOLS IN NOTES
Before I wrap up this tutorial, one more quick demo. Tap on the very last button on the main toolbar and you will get into the Apple Intelligence powered writing tools set. For a shopping list it’s not going to be tremendously useful, but still, here’s what I see:
In this instance, I’m just going to use the proofread feature because I don’t really want my shopping list rewritten, but it’ll be interesting to see what I can change to make it have better grammar and structure. A tap on “Proofread” reveals that it has five changes! And they’re all to do with capitalization:
That’s it. There are actually more tools in Notes if you’re curious, but these will definitely get you started. In the above instance, I can go back to my pre-proofread content by tapping on “revert” or I can accept the changes by tapping on “done”.
One final image. Here’s what my note looks like when I view it in the Notes app on my Mac:
As you would hope, it has retained the text, formatting, to-do list, and capitalization courtesy of the proofreading capability. What’s not obvious is that I can tap on any of the to-do circles to indicate that I have accomplished that task or added, that particular item to my shopping cart.
All in all, a ton of really powerful features hidden in your version of Notes on your Mac and iPhone. Definitely worth exploring! Good luck.
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing tutorials for the Apple iPhone since they were first released. Please check out my extensiveiPhone help areafor oodles of useful content.
notes ai, notes app, notes formatting
