FoldNotes vs visualOS

Some notes are short. Others grow into chapters, plans and running logs you scroll past a hundred times. FoldNotes lets you fold the finished parts away, so a long note stays as small as the part you are actually working on. Every note is a plain Markdown file. No database, no proprietary format, no export step. Your notes sit in iCloud Drive or on your device, and any other app can open them, today or in ten years. It is also a real iOS app, written in Swift. Not a web page in a wrapper. It opens instantly, works offline, handles a hardware keyboard properly, and does not sit in the background eating your battery. FOLD ANYTHING • Collapse any heading or list item and everything beneath it folds away • Hoist a section to work on it alone, with everything else out of sight • Task counts stay on the folded heading, so you can see what is left without unfolding WRITTEN FOR MARKDOWN • Live styling as you type — headings, lists, quotes, code, links • Six heading levels, and GFM tables with a real table editor • Code blocks with syntax highlighting • Wiki-links [[like this]], with previews and automatic backlinks • Nested tags TASKS WHERE YOU WROTE THEM • Four states: to do, in progress, done and cancelled • Due dates and priorities written inline, in plain text • Assign them to a project and add context and comments • Counts roll up to the section above them BUILT FOR IPAD • Library, notes and editor side by side • Hardware keyboard shortcuts throughout • An inspector with outline, tasks, references, properties and a note graph • Scan printed text straight into a note with the camera FIND ANYTHING • Search every note, including regular expressions • Saved queries and database views across your whole collection • Daily notes with a calendar COMING FROM ANOTHER APP • Import from Bear or Obsidian in a tap • Or simply point FoldNotes at the Markdown files you already have MAKE IT YOURS • Light and dark themes, including Nord, Dracula and Catppuccin • Choose your body, heading and code fonts • Paragraph focus, sentence focus and typewriter scrolling Folding is not a formatting trick. A long document asks you to hold every section in your head at once; folding lets you put the finished ones down. That is the whole idea, and everything else here is built around it. Your notes will outlive this app, and every app like it. That is rather the point.

visualOS is an infinite canvas for people who think visually. It is an infinite canvas for notes, folders, images, to-do’s and sketches. It works fully offline and saves to real files in a folder on your device. YOUR DATA IS A FOLDER YOU CAN OPEN Connect any folder on your disk and visualOS mirrors your canvas into it — every folder on the canvas is a real folder, every document a Markdown file, every image an image. Put the folder in iCloud or Dropbox and it syncs through your cloud, not ours. If you ever leave, everything stays readable. Forever. OFFLINE ISN'T A MODE. IT'S THE ARCHITECTURE. On a flight, on the train, in a studio with no signal — visualOS doesn’t care. There is no server to reach, so there is no spinner, no sync wheel, no login wall. Your canvas opens instantly because everything is already here. BOARDS WITHIN BOARDS Any board can hold more boards. A project becomes a world: moodboards inside client boards inside your studio. Drag elements into a board to file them away; breadcrumbs keep you oriented; a double-tap takes you deeper. NO ACCOUNT. NO SUBSCRIPTION. Open it and work. There's nothing to sign up for, nothing to verify, nothing to cancel. Pay once and it's yours forever — one purchase unlocks every Apple device. FREE IN THE BROWSER BUT THE APP GOES FURTHER Try visualOS free in your browser at visualos.app. When you're ready for it everywhere, the app adds what a browser can't: true offline access on the train or a plane, native pan-and-zoom gestures, Apple Pencil drawing, and your boards saved as real files that sync across iPhone, iPad and Mac through your own iCloud. EVERYTHING ELSE • Notes & rich text • Long-form documents stored as plain Markdown • Interactive to-do lists on the canvas • Images & PDFs — drag, paste or drop them in • Freehand drawing • Magnetic arrows that snap and bend • Search every board at once • Groups, locking and a snap grid Your ideas. Your files. ABOUT US As creatives, we’ve always relied on visual canvas tools to organize our thoughts, plan projects, and make sense of ideas. But one thing kept bothering us: our files and knowledge were always tied to cloud-based services. We wanted the freedom to access everything offline, without worrying about losing our work or giving up our privacy. So why can’t our own files on our device be visualized in the same intuitive way? And that’s how the idea for visualOS was born: a visual representation of your internal folder structure — offline, private, and secure. Your data stays on your device, where it belongs. We’re Sarah and Gerald, a husband-and-wife team who have been living, loving, and building things together for more than 20 years. Creating visualOS has been a ton of fun and thanks to AI we were able to push it further than we initially imagined. Now we’d love to hear what you think. If visualOS helps you work a little more creatively or makes your files easier to navigate, we’d be grateful if you shared it with others.