Surface Go in Apple land

With truly portable computers having gone the way of the dodo in the Apple ecosystem, one must turn to Windows to have a full operating system in a portable package. Apple has come a long way with the iPad line and from my experience they are the best tablets on the market. However, when it comes to getting work done, I’ve just found it to be a little bit more difficult than it should on iPadOS.

There are tons of “note” apps in the world. For the past year, I’ve been using Microsoft OneNote on all my devices. I have my personal and work accounts syncing on all of them and it works wonderfully. Many times though, I just want to write down something simple such as a grocery list, an idea, or just a few lines of text from a website. For those times, I find Apple’s built-in Note app to be just perfect. The problem is that it is not on Windows. For years I was using SimpleNote, but recently there have been problems with IME input and lag as the notes get long, so the Apple Note app has all my data.

In comes the new Edge browser to save the day. Its (and Chrome’s) feature to open webpages as an app has allowed me to continue to use the Note app on my Surface, giving me the ability to create, edit, and sync notes across all my devices.

To create a Notes webapp, just point your Edge (or Chrome) browser to iCloud.

Next sign into iCloud.

Finally, in your browser menu (the three dots), navigate to Apps => Install this site as an app.

And that’s pretty much it. You may have to deal with some two-factor authentication and you also might want to save your login for easy access, but you can have Notes on your Windows computer.

I have not used the Notes app extensively yet, but it does work fairly well. The only issue I have come across is that the app will occasionally log me out, so I’ll have to log back in. Additionally, using this method will allow you to access all of the iCloud services inside the app by just clicking on the upper left logo text. The big drawback to this method is that the webapp will not function without a connection to the internet, so be sure to make sure your notes are synced before going offline.

As I continue to use this method, only time will tell if it is a viable one. Let me know in the comments if you have suggestions for cross-platform note applications.