DEV Community: John Henry Roche

📝 Stop filing your notes: how Onuri finds the structure in what you write

John Henry Roche — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:08:56 +0000

🧵 Onuri: Notes & Second Brain is an iPhone app where you just write. It picks out the people, places, dates, times and topics in your notes and turns them into tappable pills, so finding something later means tapping what you remember, not digging through folders. Processing happens on-device. 👉 Onuri on the App Store

🤔 The problem with notes

Most of us are good at writing important things down, but can be bad at finding them again.

Notes apps usually ask you to organise your information as you go: e.g. pick a folder, add a tag, choose a notebook. I found that can work but can get difficult to maintain over time. Life gets busy, the system slips, and the note you need is buried under hundreds of others, and you never find it again.

With that in mind, I built Onuri around a simple idea: write naturally, and let the app find the connections for you.

✍️ Step 1: Just write

Tap + on the Home page and start typing. No folder to choose, no tags to add.

As you write, Onuri uses Apple's native, on-device technology to recognise the important parts of your note and shows them as colour-coded pills under the text - as set out below:

Pill	Category	What it picks up
🟣 Purple	People	Friends, family, colleagues
🟢 Green	Places	Cities, venues, travel spots
🔵 Blue	Topics	Themes and subjects
🟡 Yellow	Dates	Days, dates, "next week"
🔴 Red	Times	"2pm", "morning", "evening"

Save the note and it then appears in your Home feed, in date order.

🔍 Step 2: Find it by what you remember

Here's where Onuri can get really useful!

Say you're trying to remember the plans for your friend Sarah's birthday. Instead of taking time scrolling or guessing which folder you used, type "Sarah" and "birthday" into search, then tap the keyword pills to turn them into filters. The feed narrows to the notes that match:

🎂 Organise the birthday cake order
👗 Buy the blue dress she wanted

💡 Tip: if lots of notes share the same terms, stack more filters, or tap a pill inside an older note to narrow things down further. The home screen also has five quick filters for people, places, dates, times and topics to make it even faster.

🧠 Step 3: Rediscover what's related

Another cool feature is that you can open any note and you'll see a Related Entries panel. It shows older notes with a similar meaning, not just the same words. That helps when you described something differently months ago and wouldn't think to search for it.

🌟 What people use it for

Because there's no structure to set up, Onuri works for all kinds of everyday notes - which was my main aim building it:

👤 A personal CRM: keep track of the people in your life and what's going on with them.
📚 Reading logs: remember key ideas, titles or names from books and articles.
📅 Life tracking: milestones, decisions and small daily wins, all in one place.

🆕 What's new in Onuri v2

As part of a focused improvement, we recently added a Version 2.0, which was a major update:

🏠 New home-screen filters for people, places, dates, times and topics
🌙 Dark mode
🎨 Five new colour themes and matching app icons (Premium)
✅ Lightweight to-dos with Ongoing and Done statuses (Premium)
📊 Expanded Insights (Premium)
🔧 Improvements to note parsing, related entries, iCloud reliability, accessibility, and localisation in English, Japanese and Korean

💜 Free and Premium

What you get with Onuri:

Free:

Unlimited notes and journal entries
Fast text search
Person, place, date, time and topic filters
Connected terms and related entries
Automatic draft saving
Light and dark mode
iCloud sync
TXT and CSV export

Onuri Premium adds:

Insights into momentum, streaks, recurring themes and returning topics
People and place patterns across your writing
Semantic clusters and strongest connections
Ongoing and Done statuses, with filters
Meadow, Dusk, Ocean, Ink and Blossom themes, each with light and dark variants
Matching alternate app icons

🔐 Privacy

Processing happens on-device
Your notes are stored on-device and synced through your iCloud
Sign in with Apple is optional
No ads, no analytics, no tracking

📲 Try it

Onuri: Notes & Second Brain is free on iPhone (iOS 17.6 or later), with optional in-app purchases. It's 5.5 MB and available in English, Japanese and Korean.

👉 Get Onuri on the App Store · 🌐 onuri.app

I'm building Onuri solo from Ireland 🇮🇪. If you try it, I'd love to hear what you think in the comments. 💜

📸 Why I built Stillkeep: Journal & Diary, a private photo journal for iPhone

John Henry Roche — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 09:40:59 +0000

🧵 I built Stillkeep, a calm, private photo journal for iPhone. Photos and writing live together as Moments, grouped into life chapters called Eras. It's built with Native SwiftUI, CloudKit sync, zero tracking and is a sleek ~8 MB. 👉 stillkeep.app

🤔 The problem

I found I had thousands of photos on my phone. If I scrolled back far enough I could tell you what happened in most of them, but not always why it mattered. For example, who was there, what we'd been talking about, how that day actually felt.

I felt that the camera roll was keeping the picture and quietly losing the story. 📉

I tried fixing that with journaling apps, but most are built around text with photos bolted on. I found a similar issue with notes apps: I'd start a neat folder structure 📁, stop maintaining it a few weeks later, and the photos lived somewhere else entirely.

So I built Stillkeep: Journal & Diary, an iPhone app that keeps the photo and the story in the same place. ✨

🧩 The idea: Moments inside Eras

The whole app rests on two concepts:

🖼️ Moments

A Moment is a single memory: a few photos, some writing, or both. You can add:

👥 the people who were there
📍 the places involved
💭 a "vibe" for how it felt
🏷️ tags

Write as little or as much as you like. A photo with one line is a perfectly good Moment.

📚 Eras

An Era is a chapter of your life: a trip ✈️, a new job 💼, a baby's first year 👶, a house move 🏡, or just "this summer" ☀️.

Instead of one endless timeline, your journal becomes a shelf of chapters, each with its own cover.

I landed on Eras because that's how people actually remember things. Nobody thinks "March 14th". They think "back when we lived in that flat" or "the year I started running". 🏃

🌿 Making it calm

I wanted Stillkeep to feel like the opposite of a social feed:

🚫 No streaks
🚫 No nagging notifications
🚫 No likes

Inside an Era, Moments sit in a clean feed you can filter by photos, notes, people or places. Tap a photo (like one of your dog) and it fills the screen with nothing else in the way. 🐶

🔭 Reflect

This is the feature I'm proudest of. Pick any time range and Reflect gives you a quiet overview of the shape of that period, so you can step back and see how you're using the app and retaining your memories.

There's also Look Back 🕰️, which surfaces older Moments gently rather than ambushing you with "on this day" pop-ups.

📖 Export

When an Era is finished, you can export the whole thing as a PDF photobook, or share a single Moment as a Photocard. 💌

🛠️ Under the hood

This is dev.to, so here are the technical bits:


🦅 Language / UI	Native Swift + SwiftUI
📱 Target	iOS 17.6+
☁️ Sync	CloudKit, in the user's own iCloud
🔒 Tracking	None. No third-party analytics, no ad SDKs, no cross-app tracking
📦 Binary size	~8 MB

🚀 Try it

If you've ever meant to keep a journal and bounced off a blank text page, I'd love for you to give it a go:

📸 Get Stillkeep

Also, if you like and use the app, we'd love to get a rating/review from you - everything helps us to try and build Stillkeep going forward!!

👋 Also by me

Onuri 🧠 is a private notes app for iPhone that automatically connects the people, places, dates and topics in your writing. No folders, no tags to maintain.

Onuri — Private Notes & Life Tracker for iPhone

Onuri is a private notes and life tracker for iPhone with smart filters, related entries, dark mode, automatic connections and private iCloud sync.

onuri.app

How Onuri: Notes & Second Brain iOS App Helps You Remember Everything You Write Down

John Henry Roche — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 12:01:23 +0000

A Guide to Using Onuri: Notes & Second Brain as a Seamless Memory Retrieval Tool for iPhone

In this guide, I will walk you through how the app I built for iPhone, Onuri: Notes & Second Brain, acts as an effortless retrieval tool for your memories—keeping the things that matter right at your fingertips.

✍️ Step 1: Write a New Entry

To begin, simply tap the + button on the Home Page to open a New Entry.

As you type naturally, Onuri’s private on-device intelligence works quietly behind the scenes. It extracts core contextual terms and turns them into color-coded keyword pills anchored to the bottom of your text field:

Pill Indicator	Category	What It Recognizes
🟣 Purple	People	Friends, family, colleagues, or network connections
🟢 Green	Places	Cities, venues, specific locations, or travel spots
🔵 Blue	Topics	Broad themes, core subjects, and connected terms
🟡 Yellow	Dates	Specific calendar dates, seasons, or years
🔴 Red	Times	Relative signals like morning, evening, or specific hours

Once you save your entry, it immediately populates your Home Page feed in a clean, chronological timeline.

🔍 Step 2: Search and Filter Instantly

This is where the magic happens.

Imagine you are looking for specific details about your friend Sarah's upcoming birthday party. Instead of digging through messy folders, you simply type "Sarah" and "birthday" into the global search bar.

Tap the resulting pills to convert them into active filters. Onuri instantly isolates every note matching those specific criteria.

From there, recalling your action items becomes instantaneous:

🎂 Organise the birthday cake cake order
👗 Purchase the specific blue dress she wanted

💡 Power User Tip: If you have dozens of entries containing the same terms, don't worry. You can stack additional keyword filters sequentially or tap contextual pills nested directly within older entries to slice through your history in seconds.

🧠 Step 3: Discover Subconscious Connections

Tap into any note item to open the Main Note View.

Beyond showcasing your text with clear visual layout spacing, Onuri automatically surfaced a dedicated panel for Related Entries.

By evaluating semantic meaning rather than exact keyword matching, the app resurfaces older, relevant thoughts and past events—even if you used completely different vocabulary when you wrote them down months ago.

⚡ The Result: Everything in 3–4 Taps

Ultimately, Onuri eliminates structural friction. You can track down virtually any memory or note detail you've ever logged in 3 to 4 taps. No complex folder nesting, no manual tagging fatigue, and no fragmented apps.

🌟 Perfect Use Cases:

👤 Personal CRM: Keeping track of important names and relationship updates.
📚 Reading Logs: Remembering key ideas from books or articles you've read.
📅 Life Tracking: Storing milestone dates, project decisions, and small daily victories.

Want to explore further?

🌐 Website: Visit onuri.app to view our core architecture principles and guides.
📲 App Store: Get started immediately by searching "onuri" on the App Store.

I hope you love using the app! 💜