My Notes on Apple Math Notes

Placing text representations of the symbols above them (as interpreted by the handwriting algo) seems so obvious that it’s the sort of thing that I’ll be frustrated if Apple doesn’t adopt it. It generates confidence in the output.

Some things aren’t obvious until we see them. This is one.

Maybe I'm a freak but almost all of the proposed "improvements" in this article I find distracting, annoying, and would turn me off of ever using the feature. I do NOT want my notes or content dancing around on the screen or having motion displayed because its evaluating equations or statements while I'm writing them. It's also why I disable most autocomplete and warnings in code editors. I don't complaints about syntax errors for lines I haven't finished writing.

Like, why would I care about the value of `a` before I've finished writing the equation? Sometimes a tool just shutting the hell up is a good thing.

For quite a while, I’ve kept track of how many pages are left in the books I’m reading by having a note with entries along the lines of

Vargas Llosa 727-516=211

I’d forgotten about math notes / assumed it only applied to handwritten notes so the first time I updated one of these notes after updating my iOS it was a little shocking to retype the = and have the difference generated automatically instead of having to figure it out on my own. I’ve been holding off updating my Macs, but I can see this feature being really handy as a sort of lite spreadsheet replacement.

The 18.2 beta shows you the equation Apple thinks you wrote as soon as you draw the = .

Related, has anyone noticed with the new Sequoia, Apple Notes, which I use extensively, if you start searching or clicking as soon as the window open, you get a frozen application that won't recover - it must be killed? Is that being reported and if not where to?

I don't really care for the suggestion that 2 + 2 = 4, I'd rather the app be responsive on open.

I wish there's a way to restrict math notes within a bounding box. I use notes with pencil to help my kids with their math homework and it started randomly trying to solve what I was writing. I like it but wish there's more control.

In Apple Math Notes, why can't you type a simple list of numbers, either in a table or in columnar format, like:

239.12

+242.33

+673.34

-------

=

And get an answer after the equals sign? (a la Soulver) Isn't this an obvious use case? Was Apple trying really hard not to copy Soulver's implementation?

You can type them one after another on the same line and get an answer, but that's bad for readability. I want to add up numbers in a column like Soulver and a spreadsheet lets you do, and do that inside Notes.

Live graphs, function definitions and support for more calculus would be something good for the future, as it is right now this is good for basic middle school math and quick calculations.

Linear algebra, calculus notation, etc. these are necessary improvements. I think they might come in the future though, I know this will become on par with a graphic calculator.

But the problem here is: you need to pay for software development. This requires a few years of effort by a capable machine learning engineer that's also a pretty good software developer. I would love to try this, mostly to become a capable machine learning engineer. But ... what's missing is the $, like in so many software demands.

I looked up the paper on this, but there are no good models for it that generate proper syntax. So for one thing, whoever does this would need to grind out creating at minimum a few 10,000 math exercises, to get the software to work.

So this costs, say, ~400.000 USD, and 2 years of time, counting taxes, equipment, office, ... Perhaps "only" 100.000 if you're a professor and willing to use a PhD student (and deal with the issues that will give).

Now I don't mean to disparage this proposal. But this seems to be how everything works except "improve our existing boring software 1%" ... And it's frustrating. At best, I can find machine learning jobs that boil down to "make LLMs solve tickets" or, worse "make LLMs write spam" (usually customize/personalize existing spam mails). Beats solving tickets myself, that it definitely does, but something like this ...

I don't have trouble finding software development jobs. However, I cannot ever seem to do something like this. I would so love to make something like this, to really take a hard problem, work it and make something beautiful. But this is not a hobby effort. This requires spending a few years of effort making something beautiful.

If this is done as a hobby project I can make a nice tech demo, no doubt, but it will be only what I make of it, and it'll be a limited cool tech demo, just like what Apple did (making a gradio that does a few examples correctly isn't very hard), what I'd use it for. Not because I don't want to make the next generation of advanced calculators, but because I'd never have the time to do that.

I think this might be relevant: https://mathpix.com/handwriting-recognition

> First, the handwriting recognition worked flawlessly, despite my awful handwriting.

This handwriting is not awful, so no surprise it's recognized well

But the bad feedback criticism is spot on, though the better solution is to replace symbols in-place, why would you prefer your "awful handwriting" to beautiful math symbols with excellent legibility?

(and btw, pemdas forgot implied multiplication)

Math Notes is pretty cool, I used it recently to figure out what spec AC I needed to buy to climate control my non-insulated barn workshop while I'm working there. However, I struggled to get it to convert units.

An example with non-representative numbers:

    A = 10000 W
    B = A / 1 kW =

Suggestion for the website: ~double the height of the first video element; as it is, if the mouse is over the video, the play button / scrubber overlay will be displayed & obscure the video itself.

(the quote at the bottom of the article is excellent and apt, too :))

I really want to like Apples handwriting recognition, it's half the reason I bought an Apple Pencil with my new iPad. It's just kind of difficult to use in practice.

It's just not that good at recognizing my handwriting, and best I can tell has zero mechanism for teaching it to better understand.

When enabling the "autocorrect" where it cleans up your writing, it so often replaces my handwriting with the entirely wrong word as to be infuriating. On top of that, it often does so long after I wrote it so I might not even notice that it happened until I try to read the note back later.

As the author mentioned, having to switching to eraser and back is painful and annoying. I really wish the options for reflowing a document were a lot more intuitive. If I need to go back and add a sentence or two mid note I can try to draw a line to make space but it rarely works like one would expect.

I think all in all the feature is neat but half baked, and they really need to do a bunch more user testing to get it into something that you would want to use rather than a neat tech demo.

living graphs would be great.

I do not do many calculations, so my only issues where when I tried it out.

If you open the calculator app and go to handwritten calculations (whatever they're called), you have all that cool stuff. But if you open Notes, you have to click "Insert result" every single time, for better or for worse.

Also about UX improvements: lmao. There is still no way to add a new line with Scribble, or sanely write in a small text box (I guess, it's only in third-party applications I have had this issue).

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Aren't we supposed to discuss technology here before it hits the stores?