🧵 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. 💜
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