Musing Notes vs Sift

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.

Sift is a notes app built around one question: can you find what you wrote? Most note apps can't. Their search matches text exactly, so it misses "lightbulb" when you typed "light bulb", misses "running" when you searched "run", and gives you nothing at all when your thumbs put an extra letter in a word. Sift is built the other way round. FIND WHAT YOU HALF REMEMBER • Typo tolerance — "meting notes" finds "Meeting notes" • Word endings — "run" finds "running", "city" finds "Cities" • Compound words, both directions — "light bulb" finds "lightbulb", and the other way round too • Accents ignored — "resume" finds "résumé" • Results as you type, with the matching words marked so you can see why something matched • Filters when you want them: tag:work/clients, is:todo, "exact phrase", -exclude, updated:>2026-01-01 NOTHING IS EVER LOST Every save is a revision. Open the history of any note, read any earlier version, and bring it back with one tap. Restoring is itself just another revision, so it can't destroy anything either. Notes are written one file at a time, and the history is written before the file is replaced — so even an interrupted write leaves your words recoverable. Deleted notes wait 30 days in the trash. NOTES THAT KNOW ABOUT EACH OTHER Type [[ to link one note to another. The link works both ways: the note you point at shows everything that points back. A connections view draws the shape of what you've been thinking about, and notes you've mentioned but not written yet become an invitation to write them. WRITING THAT FEELS RIGHT • Live Markdown — headings, bold, highlight, quotes, code, checklists • Lists continue themselves; Return on an empty item ends the list • Tap any line to put the cursor exactly there • Tick checkboxes without entering edit mode • Nested tags like #work/clients/acme • Pin, archive, and lock notes behind Face ID • Light and dark, six accent colours, three writing fonts, four text sizes YOUR NOTES ARE YOURS Every note is a plain Markdown file stored on your device. No account. No server. No sync that can fail, because there is nothing to sync. Export any note, or all of them, whenever you like. Sift is free. There is no subscription, no advertising, no note limit, and no paid tier holding features back.