Jottle

Jottle is for the thought you need to get down before it's gone. On the Mac, press Option-Space and a notepad drops in over whatever you were doing. Type it, save it, and it's gone — no window to hunt for, no app to switch to, no file to name. On iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch it's a small app that opens on a blank line, ready. A note is a piece of plain text with a date on it. The first line becomes the title. That's the whole model, and it's the reason capture takes a second instead of a minute. EVERYWHERE, THROUGH YOUR OWN iCLOUD • Mac — a global hotkey, a menu bar item, and a proper window for when you want to read rather than write • iPhone — the list and the editor, and nothing between you and the blank line • iPad — two panes: your notes on the left, the one you're writing on the right • Apple Watch — a real app, not a mirror. Dictate or scribble from your wrist and it's on your Mac before you've put your arm down Notes sync through your own iCloud account. There's no Jottle account, no sign-in, and no server of ours in the middle. WIDGETS AND COMPLICATIONS Pin the notes that matter and they show up in the Pinned Notes widget — small, medium or large — on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen, Notification Center or the Mac desktop. On the watch, put New Note on your face to dictate with one tap, or Recent Notes to read your latest at a glance. LOCKED NOTES, ACTUALLY LOCKED Lock any note and its body is encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a passphrase only you know, derived with PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations. Only the ciphertext is stored and only the ciphertext syncs, so a locked note is unreadable everywhere except on a device where you've entered the passphrase. Face ID or Touch ID unlocks it after the first time. There's no recovery and no backdoor. Forget the passphrase and the note is gone for good. That's not an oversight — it's the feature. PLAIN TEXT, NOT A TRAP Export one note or all of them as ordinary Markdown files, with the dates kept in the front matter. Import a folder of them back. They're readable in any editor, searchable from the command line, and already covered by whatever backup you run. You are never locked in. THE REST OF IT Pin a note to keep it at the top. Archive one to get it out of the way without deleting it. Search across everything, or find within the note you're editing. Set the text size to something your eyes agree with. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO No account. No subscription. No analytics, no advertising, no crash reporting, no third-party SDKs of any kind. Jottle makes no network requests of its own — the only thing it talks to is your iCloud, at your instruction. Nothing about you or your notes is collected, because there is nothing in it to collect them with. Requires macOS 26, iOS or iPadOS 26, or watchOS 26. Syncing needs an Apple Account signed in with iCloud Drive on; without one, Jottle runs perfectly well on a single device and tells you plainly that it isn't syncing.