Einfall vs Jottle

Einfall is a place for fugitive thoughts. The thought arrives while you are busy with something else — in a queue, on a walk, halfway through a meeting. Einfall is the fastest place to put it, and a place you can trust to keep it. Get it out of your head in a second. Deal with it later. Or never. One-time purchase. No subscription. Capture wherever you are Whichever device is nearest your hand, and never more than one gesture: • The Mac menu bar, summoned by a keyboard shortcut from any app • Home-screen and lock-screen widgets • Control Centre, on iPhone, iPad and Mac • The share sheet, for a link or a passage of text • The Services menu on Mac, for selected text in any app • Shortcuts, Siri, Spotlight and the Action Button • Your voice, transcribed on your device as you speak None of them make you look at your stream first. Capture is free and unlimited, forever. One calm stream Everything you capture lands in a single flat list, newest first. No folders, no notebooks, no unread counts, no reminders that you are behind. Plain text you can read, edit and search. Tags if you want them, nothing to tend if you do not. A long stream is not a backlog — it is a notebook you trust. Do something with a thought, when you are ready Open the stream, pick a thought and fire an action: • Send it out — to Reminders, Calendar, Mail, Messages, Files, the share sheet or a Shortcut • Change it in place — tidy the phrasing with Apple Intelligence on your device, turn prose into a list, change the case, stamp the time it was caught, copy it • Fold it into another thought, so related notes gather in one place A thought that gets routed leaves the stream. A thought you no longer need is deleted, without ceremony. Both are good endings. Your own AI agent, if you use one Einfall carries an optional local server on Mac — off until you turn it on — so your own AI agent can read and work on your stream on your behalf. Whatever you can do in the app, your agent can do too. Nothing it writes changes a thought until you accept it. Private because there is nowhere else to be No account. No sign-in. No infrastructure of ours between you and your thoughts. Your stream syncs across your own devices through iCloud, and nowhere else. Dictation and Apple Intelligence run on your device. Einfall's App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, because none is. You can lock the stream behind Face ID or Touch ID, export the whole thing as one plain-text file whenever you like, and keep automatic backups in a folder you choose. Free to capture. Pay once to unlock everything you can do with your thoughts. Capturing is free and unlimited, forever. Reading and searching your stream is always free. So are the in-place actions — copy, listify, change case and timestamps. The routing layer — sending a thought out to another app, folding one thought into another, and Apple Intelligence — gives you fifteen free fires. After that, a single one-time purchase unlocks it for good, on every device you own, and for your household through Family Sharing. No subscription. Nothing to renew. Nothing expires. Your own thoughts are never held behind a lapsing fee. Einfall is the German word for an idea that falls into your mind unprompted. This is the place to put those thoughts before they are gone. Mac, iPhone and iPad. Requires macOS 26, iOS 26 or iPadOS 26.

Jottle is for the thought you need to get down before it's gone. Open it and there's a blank line, waiting. Type the thought, tap Add Note, and get on with your day. There's nothing to set up and nothing to file. 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 why capture takes a second instead of a minute. EACH DEVICE GETS ITS OWN SHAPE • iPhone: the list and the editor, and nothing between you and the blank line • iPad: your notes on the left and a full page for writing on the right • Apple Watch: a real app, not a mirror. Dictate or scribble from your wrist. It syncs straight from iCloud, so it works with your phone out of range • Mac: Jottle is there too, as a notepad that drops in over whatever you're doing with one keystroke 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 or in Notification Center. 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, and an open locked note is hidden from the app switcher. 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 open in any editor and are 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. MAKE IT YOURS Eight accent colors, light or dark, on a Paper or Bright background, and a text size your eyes agree with. Your watch keeps a color of its own. FREE Jottle on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch is free, with every feature. The Mac app is a separate choice: a free 14-day trial, then a one-time purchase. 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 iOS or iPadOS 26. The Apple Watch app requires 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.