Notada
Download for Mac
Meeting notes for Mac
Notada is a page for your meeting notes, one day after another. Every open todo and question on it shows up in a list beside the text, sorted by how long it has been waiting. One Markdown file on disk. No account, no server.
Download for Mac$10, once. No subscription.
⌘↩ closes the current line⇧⌘↩ drops it⌘L hides the list/ opens the palette
1
Take notes the way you already do. Each day starts under its own date, on the same page, and you never organize anything: no folders, no tags, no fields, and no separate list to keep. The list beside your notes is read from the text: every open todo and question, as you wrote it. Close an item there and the line it came from closes with it. The notes are the source; the list is a view of them.
The whole grammar is below: a few marks at the start of a line, and a date at the end when you mean one. Everything else is just text, stored exactly as written.
| You type | Stored as | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| [] or todo: | - [ ] | Open todo. Ages until you close it. |
| ? | - [?] | Open question. A line is a question because it starts with ?, never because of its words. |
| ! or decided: | - [!] | Decision. Terminal; it never closes. |
| Close it in the list, or ⌘↩ | - [x] | Done, stamped done:2026-09-11. |
| Drop it in the list, or ⇧⌘↩ | - [-] | Dropped. Decided not to. Stays, crossed out. |
| due:fri due:9/18 due:tomorrow | due:2026-09-18 | A date, at the end of the line. Dated items sort to the top of the list. |
2
Most things written in a meeting are undated. Making them age instead of making them due removes the guilt of a task manager and the planning it demands. Every open item in the list shows how long it has been waiting: days, then weeks, then months. It gets old, and that is all that happens to it.
When you did promise a date, put it on the line: due:fri. Dated items sort to the top of the list, and the list makes it clear the moment one is overdue.
3
The file is the truth; the app is the best view of it, not the only one. What you type is what is stored: no hidden metadata, no autocorrect, no smart quotes, no silent rewriting. Other tools may read it and write it; Notada watches the file and keeps up.
## 2026-09-03 Retro. The team wants shorter standups and a clearer definition of done. - [ ] Send Priya the retro notes - [?] Should design join backlog grooming? - [ ] Draft the definition of done with Alex due:2026-09-10 - [x] Clear the finished cards off the board done:2026-09-03
The file on disk: plain Markdown in your Documents folder. The second day in the window above is this text.
4
Notada calls no models. It has no account, no server, and no subscription, which is what keeps it local, private, and yours to keep. What it does instead is expose the structure: a command line reads the list as JSON and appends or closes lines safely, so the assistant you already use can work with your notes without touching the editor. This is the window above, as the CLI reports it.
$ notada ledger --json { "today": "2026-09-11", "open": [ { "text": "Draft the definition of done with Alex", "due": "2026-09-10", "overdue": true, "age": "8d", "line": 12 }, { "text": "Review the onboarding copy before the release", "due": "2026-09-11", "line": 17 }, { "text": "Write the onboarding brief for the design review", "age": "3w", "line": 3 }, { "text": "Send Priya the retro notes", "age": "8d", "line": 10 }, { "text": "Check the release notes with Sam", "line": 19 } ], "questions": [ { "text": "Who writes the release notes now?", "line": 18 }, { "text": "Should design join backlog grooming?", "age": "8d", "line": 11 }, { "text": "Do we keep the free trial at 14 days?", "age": "3w", "line": 4 } ], "decided": [ { "text": "Onboarding ships before the pricing page. Sam owns the copy.", "date": "2026-08-19", "line": 5 } ] } $ notada append "- [ ] Reply to Priya about the trial length due:mon" $ notada close 12
What you ask it for is up to you. A brief before standup: what you said you would do, what is due this week, the longest-open question as a talking point. A carry-forward on Friday: open items by age, decisions made, topics that came up three times with no decision, a promise in the prose with no checkbox beside it. A local MCP server is coming soon.
Who it is for
Anyone who takes notes in meetings and would rather not run a task manager on the side. You type fast during the meeting. Afterwards, you want to know what you promised and which questions are still waiting for an answer, without keeping a list.
Notada is not a task manager with notes attached, and it is not a place to build a second brain. It is your notes, with a list that keeps up with them.
From the maker
I have given up on more notes apps than I can count, and the writing was never the problem. The problem came later: the todos I wrote down sank out of view, decisions got buried, and things I had promised quietly died.
Notada fixes the later part without changing the writing. You keep taking notes. It keeps the list of what is still open, and it never asks you to organize anything. I built it for my own meetings, and it is where they live now.
Daniel Larsson