Why HelloNotes exists
Most note apps ask you to put your thinking inside their database, in their format, on their servers. That is a large amount of trust to extend to software — and it tends to be discovered only when you want to leave, or when the service does.
HelloNotes takes the opposite position. Your notes are plain Markdown files in a folder you choose. There is no proprietary store, no sync service of ours, and no account. The folder in Finder is the database. If HelloNotes disappeared tomorrow, every note would still open in any text editor on any platform.
Built for the Mac, not ported to it
The app is written in Swift with AppKit, SwiftUI and TextKit 2. The editor is a real native text view, so typing stays responsive in long documents and the app behaves the way Mac software should — proper menus and keyboard shortcuts, Shortcuts and Spotlight integration, Quick Look, widgets, VoiceOver support and on-device intelligence.
The only place a web view appears is in the read-only Preview, which deliberately renders through the same engine GitHub uses so that what you see matches what GitHub would show. The editing path itself never touches one.
Privacy is the default, not a setting
HelloNotes collects nothing. No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting to us, no advertising identifiers, no accounts. We do not run a server that could receive your notes even if we wanted to.
The AI features run on-device using Apple Intelligence. If you choose to configure a cloud model with your own API key, that is your key and your account, and it is off until you set it up. The same applies to Git: you can sync to a remote you control, and we are never a party to it. The privacy policy spells this out in full.
Open source
The complete source is on GitHub. You are welcome to read it, build it, check the privacy claims above against the code, or open an issue.
Who makes it
HelloNotes is designed and published by Hello Tham Pty. Ltd., a small software company. You can find our other work at hellotham.com.
Questions, bugs or ideas are always welcome at info@hellotham.com, or through the support page.