Musing Notes vs Inkstone Notes

Some ideas arrive half-formed — at a café in the rain, on a walk, the moment before sleep. Musing is built to catch them, and to give them back to you exactly when you need them. You don't file. You don't sort. You don't tag. You just write — or speak — and move on. Later, you find any note the way you'd ask a friend: "What was that wine I liked?" "The café idea when it was raining." FREE · PRIVATE · ON YOUR DEVICE Musing is free — no ads, no account, no subscription, no credits. Capture, context, photos, and text search work on every supported device. Ask answers and semantic recall use Apple Intelligence on devices that support it — otherwise search stays useful without them. No server ever reads a note by default, nothing trains a model, and notes sync only through your own private iCloud — across iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac. SEARCH BY THE MOMENT Every note quietly keeps its moment — neighborhood, weather, time of day, the kind of place. So you can ask by it: "coffee shop notes," "rainy day ideas," "notes from Traverse City," "late night notes" — or combined, "receipts from Oak Park last month." Instant, even offline. JUST ASK Search isn't a keyword box. Type what you're looking for in plain language and Musing surfaces the notes that match — even when you don't remember the exact words. Questions get answers grounded in your own notes, citing the notes they came from. CATCH IT HOWEVER IT ARRIVES Type a quick thought. On iPhone, speak a voice note — transcribed on-device; on Mac, dictate straight into the composer. Attach a photo and Musing reads what's there on your device — a receipt gets its total, a grocery list becomes a checklist. Check in to save a place. On iPhone: Home Screen widget, Siri, Shortcuts, Apple Watch, and the share sheet. On Mac: a menu-bar capture that never needs the main window, plus a Reading Room for asking and browsing. YOUR PLACES A quiet map of everywhere you've paused — most-visited spots and neighborhoods, on iPhone and in a dedicated Places window on Mac. WHEN YOU RETURN Walk back into a café you've written in and that note can meet you on Home — a quiet lock-screen banner too, if you ask. A year on, an echo: Time Recall brings the note back with the weather and the street still on it. Place Recall and Time Recall (Echoes) stay off until you turn them on. Hospitals, clinics, and places of worship stay unnamed, and never trigger. FIVE ROOMS TO WRITE IN Choose how Musing feels. Foolscap, Inkwell, Verdant, Dusk, or Harbor. Light and dark work in every theme. BRING YOUR OWN AI SERVICE Optional Pro Mode lets you paste your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key so Ask and web lookup can use GPT or Claude. You choose the provider, use your own account, and keep usage and costs under your control. Off by default — not a paid upgrade inside Musing. Capture, search, and tags stay on this device. Nothing trains a model. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Sensitive places — clinics, hospitals, places of worship — are never named. Every context signal has an off switch. NO FOLDERS. NO FEED. NO BUSYWORK. Capture a half-formed idea. Find it later. Free. Private. Yours.

Inkstone keeps your notes as what they already are: plain Markdown files, in a folder you choose, on your own device. There is no database, no import step and no proprietary format. A vault another Markdown app created opens here, and a vault created here opens there. If Inkstone disappeared tomorrow, you would still have a folder of Markdown. WRITING Headings, bold, quotes, callouts, checkboxes, tables and code all render in place as you type, with the syntax revealed only on the line the cursor is on. Reading mode is a separate, read-only view for when you want the page without the scaffolding. Body font, code font and their sizes are set independently. LINKING [[Note]], [[Note#Heading]], [[Note^block]], ![[Embeds]] and aliases declared in frontmatter all resolve into one index. Every note shows what points at it, what it points at, and which of its links have no target yet. Rename a note and every link that pointed at it is rewritten across the whole vault, in the same action. SEEING THE SHAPE The graph view draws your notes as nodes joined by their links, and the simulation is deterministic — the same vault draws the same picture every time, so you can learn its layout instead of re-reading it on every open. SPATIAL NOTES The canvas puts cards, files and connections on an infinite sheet, saved as JSON Canvas 1.0 — the same open format other implementations read and write. FINDING THINGS A fuzzy switcher opens over every note with one gesture. Full-text search understands tag: and path:, and tags work inline or in frontmatter, nested, in any script. TYPOGRAPHY THAT HANDLES CJK Chinese sets solid — no word spaces — so a Latin word dropped into a Han sentence collides with it. Inkstone sets the gap between scripts properly, and lets you choose fonts and sizes that suit both. TWO DEVICES Sync a vault through iCloud, or push it to a GitHub repository with conflicts settled once rather than left as two copies. Per-file-type filters decide whether attachments and media travel with it. PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION No account. No telemetry. No network call you did not ask for. Your files are on your device and go only where you send them. Interface in English, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.