Desk Notes

• On the desktopSmall by default, full screen when I want it. Float above everything, sit like a normal window, or pin to the desktop.
• Projects, then pagesEach project holds pages, and every page can hold more pages, the way Notion does.
• Rich textHeadings, lists, to-dos and bold without seeing the symbols. Markdown shortcuts and a / menu for speed.
• LightNative, not a web page in a wrapper. It should cost nothing to leave open.
• On the phoneThe same projects and pages, editable, and working offline.
• No iCloudSync through a server I control, on a free plan.

It lives in the menu bar. ⌥Space shows or hides it from any app. It opens as a small window with just the page. Widen it, or go full screen, and the page list slides in beside it.

Typing ## and a space makes a heading, [] makes a to-do, and **bold** turns bold as I close it. Selecting text brings up a small formatting bar. Everything is saved as plain Markdown in a local SQLite file, so the notes are readable even without the app.

A web app, served by the same Cloudflare Worker that does the syncing, and added to the home screen. The Mac shows a QR code. Scanning it opens the app already connected, and the token travels in the part of the link that never reaches the server.

On the iPhone, Safari puts its own bar above the keyboard, and a web page can’t remove it. It covered the formatting buttons. So while I’m typing, the buttons move to the top of the screen instead.

Every device keeps its own full copy. The server only remembers what changed, and in what order.

Each change gets a number from a counter on the server. A device asks “what changed after number N?” and gets just that. If two devices edit the same page before either syncs, the server’s copy wins, and the other edit is kept as a “(conflicted copy)” page, so nothing is ever lost.

Most checks find nothing new, so that answer is made cheap: one look at the counter, no tables read. The Mac checks every minute while its window is open and every five minutes when it’s hidden. My own edits go up a few seconds after I stop typing.

Everything I copy, in any app, lands in a list for 30 days. Click an item to copy it again, pin one to keep it longer. Copies that password managers mark as secret are skipped.

The same text copied on both devices is one item, not two. Its id is a fingerprint of the text itself. An iPhone won’t let a web app watch the clipboard, so the phone has a button instead: Add what I copied.

A page or a whole project can be shared as a read-only link. The link is random, hidden from search engines, and can be turned off from the Mac at any time. It always shows the current version, and the page has no scripts at all.

A few hours in, a real note came out like this: “EQuestions to ask”, “BWhat made you DM me”. Every letter I typed above existing text landed at the start of the next line.

The cause was a font. Avenir Next has no glyph for some characters, like ⌥ or an emoji, so macOS quietly draws them in a fallback font. On every keystroke, my styling code “corrected” that font back to Avenir. The text system counted the correction as an edit and moved the cursor to the end of it.

The fix was to leave fallback fonts alone. The bigger fix was the test. The checks I had typed into an editor that wasn’t in a real window, where the bug never shows. Now there’s a test that opens the real window on a throwaway database and sends it real keystrokes.

• MacSwift, SwiftUI and AppKit, built with Swift's own package tool and no Xcode. A menu-bar app with a global shortcut.
• StorageSQLite with full-text search. Pages are stored as Markdown, and the editor converts both ways.
• ServerOne Cloudflare Worker and a D1 database. It serves the sync API, the phone app and the share pages.
• PhoneA web app with the TipTap editor, IndexedDB for offline storage, and the same Markdown rules as the Mac.
• TestsMarkdown round trips, two-device sync against a local server, the phone app in a headless browser, and keystrokes in the real Mac window.
• BudgetCloudflare's free plan, kept far from its limits on purpose.

1. 24 Oct, 4:56 pmAn empty folderNotes first. The dashboard can wait.
2. 5:26 pmThe Mac app runsProjects, notes, rich text, the menu bar.
3. 6:35 pmPages inside pagesA calmer layout that opens small.
4. 6:56 pmAvenir Next, auto-format, syncAfter five rounds of fonts.
5. 7:19 pmThe phone app and share linksSet up by QR code.
6. 7:42 pmThe scrambled-letters bugFound on a real note, fixed with a real-window test.
7. 8:43 pmThe clipboard, on both devicesThen trimmed so it barely touches Cloudflare's free plan.
8. 29 OctIts own addressdesk.suvam.workers.dev.

• Test where the user is. The bug lived in the real window, so the test has to as well.
• Free plans are a design constraint. Making “nothing changed” cheap mattered more than anything clever.
• Say no to the second half. The dashboard was the bigger idea. The notes were what I actually needed.