PortaCue for Obsidian vs Keepout

Your Obsidian vault, finally fast on a phone. PortaCue opens the same folder Obsidian does and writes the same plain Markdown files. No account, no sync service, no import, no database. Point it at your vault and every capture lands in today's note, timestamped and filed, before you lower the phone. CAPTURE BEFORE THE THOUGHT GOES • Press the Action button with the phone still locked and talk. The Dynamic Island shows it recording. • Tap the widget, ask Siri, or use the share sheet from any app. • Speak from your Apple Watch with the phone in another room. It weaves in when the phone catches up. • Type an entry straight into the note, with an optional place stamp. Every route ends in the same place: a line in your daily note. SPEECH THAT NEVER LEAVES THE DEVICE Whisper (many languages, even mixed mid-sentence) and Parakeet run on this phone, and Apple's engine does wherever iOS supports it. Local models cost storage, not money. PHOTOS THAT BECOME TEXT Photograph a whiteboard, a page or a receipt. Vision reads it on-device and saves clean, searchable Markdown beside the image. Lists and tables are restored and the raw text is always kept. A business card, address, flyer or book cover can file itself as a structured note in People, Places, Events or Books. TASKS, IN THE FORMAT YOUR VAULT ALREADY USES "Call the plumber tomorrow at five, urgent" becomes a real vault task with due date, time, priority, repeats and subtasks, always previewed before anything is written. Compatible with the Tasks and TaskNotes line formats. • Home Screen and StandBy widgets. Ticking a task writes to the vault in place, without launching the app. • Lock Screen reminders with Complete, Start, Snooze and Add note. • Focus sessions run as a Live Activity with a countdown and a progress ring. • A full task editor with projects, plus a ledger of planned load, streaks and where the hours go. YOUR VAULT TALKS BACK • The Daily Brief: overdue, due today, your routines, and what your notes say about today. Ask Siri for it. • Ask your vault: answers cite the exact lines they came from. On-device by default. Cloud is strictly opt-in. • Ask anything: a general chat that can attach the notes you choose, fill a template, and save the answer as a note. • Wikilinks woven for you: mentions of your notes become [[links]], conservatively, so ambiguous titles never link. THE SHELF: SAVE NOW, READ LATER Share a link and it becomes a readable note in your vault: title, essence and links to related notes. Read aloud, resume where you stopped, keep a verdict. Video links arrive with their transcript and chapters. Recipes open with scaling, step timers and cook mode. SNIPPETS The paragraphs you write again and again, keyed by one word, with blanks that fill themselves. Reachable from Siri, Spotlight and Shortcuts. OUR TABLE: SHARED, WITH ONE OTHER PERSON A household inbox as real files in a folder you already share: lists, logs, plans and boards, each capture stamped with who wrote it. Siri opens any list by name. A device-local Face ID lock guards what you choose. ON EVERY SCREEN YOU OWN iPad gets a standing sidebar and the Brief on a rail. Apple Watch records on its own. Mono is the default look: the day as a printed page on warm, neutral or dark stock. Glass is there if you prefer colour. PRIVACY PortaCue has no account and no analytics. It collects nothing. Your notes are files on your disk and in your own iCloud, and nothing else. Cloud features are off until you turn them on: Apple's Private Cloud Compute with no key, or a provider you connect with your own API key, stored in the Keychain. Requires iOS 26. PortaCue reads and writes ordinary Markdown files in a folder you choose, and works with any such folder whether or not another app is installed. PortaCue is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Obsidian. Obsidian is a trademark of its respective owner.

Keepout is a private notes app for iPhone and iPad. Write and connect ideas in an encrypted vault on your device, with optional sync and connections you choose to enable. PRIVATE BY DESIGN • AES-256-GCM encryption protects every note, saved AI memory, and imported AI secret at rest. • Your vault key stays in this device's non-synchronizing Keychain. • Opaque filenames keep note titles and links out of the file system. • Core note writing works without an account or network connection. • Choose whether to pair devices for encrypted note and clipboard sync. CONNECTED KNOWLEDGE • Link notes with familiar double-bracket wiki links. • Follow backlinks and suggested related notes. • Explore an interactive knowledge graph built with Apple's local sentence embeddings. • Search decrypted notes in memory while the vault is unlocked. AI AND CONNECTED FEATURES • Ask questions, summarize a note, and suggest connections using Apple Foundation Models on supported devices. • Search encrypted chat memory by meaning with Apple's local Natural Language embeddings. • Local AI availability depends on device support and Apple Intelligence settings. • If you configure a networked AI provider, requests can send prompts and relevant context to that provider. • Optional Writing Tools can send selected text to Apple's services; leave them disabled to avoid that editor connection. • Publish a note to your own Microfeed site with your site's API key. FOCUSED WRITING • Open the transient action bar from the toolbar or with Command-K on a hardware keyboard. • Press Command-F on a hardware keyboard to search private chat memory semantically. • Type / in the editor for headings, lists, tasks, quotes, code blocks, dividers, and links. • Switch to a centered typewriter view that hides the side columns and softly fades the page edges. • Navigate with touch or hardware-keyboard shortcuts on iPad. • Markdown syntax and link destinations stay visually quiet until the caret enters them. OPTIONAL DEVICE CONNECTIONS • Pair your own devices to sync encrypted notes through a relay while Keepout is open and unlocked. • Enable encrypted clipboard sync for paired devices. On iPhone and iPad, use the Paste control to send text. • Optionally index note titles and tags in protected on-device Spotlight search; the index clears when the vault locks. Keepout stores each encrypted note in a .md file so your vault remains a collection of Markdown documents without exposing their contents at rest.