Revisiting Apple Notes (6): The Protobuf

Re:Revisiting Apple Notes (6): The Protobuf by thesnarky1 on Monday September 21, 2020 @09:50PM (#24550101)

I was not here, but wanted to create an account to thank you for the work you did years ago. Your work was really critical to my understanding of tables and I wish I had found it sooner!

I keep meaning to go back and add in the drawing code, but since I can export the fallback image directly, I just use that for now in the parser.

Glad you liked the article and really glad to see you specifically comment on it. Thank you!

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Re:Revisiting Apple Notes (6): The Protobuf by dunham on Monday September 21, 2020 @11:10PM (#24550480)

That project sent me down a rabbit hole learning about CRDTs. I'd love to learn more about the history of the Notes implementation. Who did it? What background did they have? Their "topotext" construct is similar to RGA, but different from any paper that I can find. I think it was invented by the developers.

The drawing thing I did because it was interesting - the kind of data that would be fun to have to play around with character / shape recognition. I export it as SVG for my "notes2html". But since my output doesn't take into account the pen angle, pressure, and velocity, it isn't going to be as good as Apple's PNG.

The actual raw data for the stroke is a series of PKCompressedStrokePoint structures that contain timestamp, position, radius, aspectRatio, edgeWidth, force, azimuth (scaled radians), altitude, and opacity.

I had to look at disassembled libraries to figure that part out. Peeking at PencilKit again with Hopper makes me think that the structure layout may have changed since I wrote that code.

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