For Mac · macOS 14 and later

Highlight it. Know it.

Cocoa Notes is a notebook that does the second half for you. Name a highlighter "Formulas", mark text as you read, and the flashcards, recall sessions and exams are already made.

Get Cocoa Notes Read the guide

Free as a notebook · one-time unlock for the study engine · no account

How it works

A highlighter that means something

In every other app a highlight is a colour. In Cocoa it is a name — and a name is something the computer can work with.

  • Formulas
  • Terminology
  • Dates
  • On the Exam
  1. Step one

    Name your pens

    Formulas. Terminology. Dates. On the Exam. Whatever your course actually needs. Each folder can carry its own set, so red means formulas in Finance and dates in History.

  2. Step two

    Mark as you read

    Select and click a pen, or press ⌃1 through ⌃9. Hold a pen down and every sweep marks. Nothing about this is slower than highlighting on paper.

  3. Step three

    It is already studied

    Every mark gathers into a list by pen. Flashcards come from what you marked. Recall schedules the hard ones. Quizzes and exams draw from the same marks. You never type a card.

The study engine

The night before, the work is done

Open the Formulas collection for a course and every formula you marked all semester is on one page, each one a click away from the sentence it came from. Export it as a PDF and print it.

Start a recall session and Cocoa schedules what you keep getting wrong. Generate a quiz and answer it. Generate an exam and it marks you at the end. All of it is built from marks you already made while reading — plus any questions you want to write yourself.

Files and slides

A sentence that opens the slide it came from

Drop the lecture deck into the note. Select the words you wrote about slide 14, choose Link to a File, and pick that page. From then on, clicking those words opens slide 14 beside your writing.

PowerPoint, Keynote, Pages and Numbers are converted to PDF automatically so any page can be linked. Files are copied next to the note, so the two always travel together.

Your notes are files

Open the folder. There they are.

Cocoa writes plain Markdown into a folder you choose — on this Mac, or in iCloud Drive so the same notes appear on every Mac you own. There is no account and no server. The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected, because nothing is.

Even the highlights live in the file. A mark is an ordinary HTML tag in the text, so your highlighting survives in any other editor, and any assistant that reads Markdown can read your notes.

BUS314 / chapter-04.md
---
title: Cost of Capital
paper: ruled
---

## Weighted average cost of capital

The firm discounts every project at its WACC, so the number below
decides which projects clear the bar.

<mark class="formulas">WACC = (E/V · Re) + (D/V · Rd · (1 − Tc))</mark>

Tc is the <mark class="terminology">marginal tax rate</mark>, not the average one.

This is your note, opened in TextEdit. Nothing is hidden in a database.

Paper on screen

A notebook, not a scroll

A note is a paginated document with real pages: ruled, squared, dotted or blank stock in a choice of paper colours, page numbers, a page count, dog-ears to fold a corner, thumbnails down the side. Printing comes out one to one with the screen.

It is a native Mac app written in Swift — menus, keyboard shortcuts, Services, Spotlight, Shortcuts, AppleScript, Quick Look, Handoff, and a capture window a hotkey away. Not a website in a wrapper.

Price

Pay once, or never

The notebook is free and complete. You only pay for the study engine, and you pay for it once.

Cocoa Notes

Free

Forever, with no account

  • Unlimited notes, folders and pages
  • All paper styles, pictures, tables, files panel
  • Search, capture, Shortcuts, AppleScript, Spotlight
  • Import, export, daily backups, version history
  • Two highlighter pens, and every collection
  • Three sentence-to-slide links
Get Cocoa Notes

Before you download

What Cocoa Notes is not

Volunteered up front, so nothing about it surprises you after you have paid.

Mac only

macOS 14 or later. There is no iPad, iPhone or Windows version. An iPad version is being considered, nothing more.

Typed, not handwritten

No Apple Pencil, no handwriting recognition. You can add pictures, scans and photos from an iPhone.

Sync means iCloud Drive

Keep the notes folder in iCloud Drive and every Mac you own sees the same notes. There is no Cocoa sync service.

One person at a time

No shared editing or collaboration. You can export and send a file like any other document.

No AI inside the app

The AI feature is a set of prompts you copy into ChatGPT, Claude or anything else. Cocoa sends nothing anywhere.

Highlight it. Know it.

Free to use as a notebook. The study engine is a one-time unlock — no subscription, no account, nothing collected.

Get Cocoa Notes

Requires macOS 14 or later. Apple silicon and Intel.