Trace vs Nook

You'll Forget What You Read Today. Trace Won't. You read six articles, finished a podcast, and saved three more things to read later. By Friday, most of it is gone. The links scatter across browser history, three news apps, and a save list you never reopen. Trace fixes this with one idea: record the day, not the link. What you finished and what you still mean to get to, in one place. WHAT IT DOES Share anything to Trace as you go: articles, podcast episodes, songs, books. Trace collects them and turns each day into one clean, browsable entry, listed in the order you took them in, with the time on each. Tap a date and you see exactly what went into your head that day. The capture costs nothing to learn, because it rides the iOS share sheet you already use. WHY ONE ENTRY PER DAY MATTERS Most save-it-later tools work one item at a time. Pipe ten articles to Notion and you get ten separate pages to sort through later. Trace produces a single daily report that holds everything, every format in one stream, every title already wrapped as a clickable link to its source. That is the difference between a pile of clippings and a finished record. You stop assembling the day by hand, because the day arrives assembled. ONE LIST FOR EVERYTHING YOU MEAN TO GET TO Every news app has its own save button, and every save list is capped, buried, and walled off from the rest. Save a piece in one app, a video in another, a podcast in a third, and you have three lists to remember and the wrong app to open. Trace pulls them into one stream, each item a tap from its source. Share the things you want to come back to, and they wait in a single place instead of scattered across apps you forget you used. Everything Trace captures lives on your device. Nothing routes through a server. When you want the data elsewhere, you choose where it goes: • Notion: send the daily report straight into a database, such as your journal. • Obsidian: export to a vault folder. • Files: drop reports into any folder, including iCloud Drive. • Manual: export today as a PDF or your whole archive as a zip. No account. No subscription. No lock-in. The exits are clean, so your record is always yours to take. BUILT TO FEED A SECOND BRAIN The daily report is consistently structured: titles, sources, timestamps, and live links, the same shape every day. That makes it easy for you to read and easy for an AI agent to use. Ask the agent sitting on your Notion, "find the articles I read about the SpaceX IPO back in May," and it works from one well-formed record per day instead of parsing scattered pages or a save list it cannot filter by date. Trace does not try to be the agent. It makes the agent's job easier. FOR RESEARCH, IT WRITES THE BIBLIOGRAPHY Gathering sources by hand means copying a URL, copying the title, then stitching them together in your document, over and over. Trace hands you the formatted, linked list already built. When your reading for a project clusters across a few days, the report is a working bibliography you can lift straight into a draft. When it runs over weeks, the agent pulls the relevant subset out of your daily logs. Either way, the tedious step is gone. WHO IT'S FOR People who read a lot across formats, keep a structured journal in Notion or Obsidian, and want the day consolidated rather than the item saved. If that is you, nothing else does this cleanly. Trace records what you consumed, hands it off to the systems you already live in, and gets out of the way.

Nook is an RSS reader for people who would rather choose what they read. Add a feed, or paste a website and let Nook find the feed for you. Your subscriptions, what you have read, and what you have starred live on your device. There is no account to create, and nothing about your reading is sent anywhere. A READER THAT GETS OUT OF THE WAY Articles render natively, with real typography rather than a web page squeezed into a phone. Headings, quotes, code, tables, nested lists, images, and video all keep their structure. Set the font, size, line height, letter spacing, and colours, and switch any single feed to a full-page reader or the original site when its own layout is worth keeping. WORKS WITHOUT A NETWORK Nook is offline-first, not offline-capable. It launches, lists, and reads with no connection. Choose the articles to keep for later and decide when they expire. SYNC WITHOUT AN ACCOUNT Point Nook at a folder in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or anywhere else that syncs files, and your feeds, read state, stars, categories, and folders follow you between devices. The folder service moves the files; Nook merges them, per device, so two devices changed at once do not overwrite each other. No server of ours is involved, because there isn't one. TRANSLATION, ON YOUR TERMS Translate a full article or just the titles in a list. Apple Intelligence runs on the device and costs nothing. Gemini is opt-in and uses an API key you provide, kept in this device's Keychain and never placed in the sync folder. ORGANISE IT HOWEVER YOU THINK Folders for feeds, colour-coded categories for articles, keyword rules, and text filters that collect what you would rather not see instead of deleting it. Optionally let Apple Intelligence or Gemini sort new articles by subject. QUIET BY DEFAULT No advertising, no tracking, no analytics, and no engagement mechanics. Badges and new-article notifications start off, and Nook asks for permission only after you turn one on — never at launch. PUBLISHING (BETA, INVITATION ONLY) Nook can also publish what you write. Articles are stored as records in an AT Protocol repository that belongs to you, and served as a web page with a real feed others can subscribe to. You can export every record and delete it at any time, including while publishing is suspended. This part of Nook is in beta and needs an invitation; everything above works without one.