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Getting started

Antinote on iPhone and iPad is a stack of notes: the newest is on top, swipe right for older ones, swipe left past the newest to start a new one, and everything else starts at the Orb at the bottom of the screen. Settings has a search field that finds any setting by name or description.

Updated for iOS 1.65

Getting started

Design Intent: Never title, delete, organize or worry about a note. Antinote is a scratchpad: the newest note is always one swipe away, and old ones fade out on their own.

Your notes are a stack

  • Antinote opens on your newest note. Older notes sit behind it, oldest at the back.
  • Swipe right anywhere on the page to go back to the previous (older) note; swipe left to come forward again.
  • Swipe left past the newest note to start a new one. There is no "new note" button to find — though the Orb has one too.
  • A note you leave empty is deleted the moment you swipe away from it.

The Orb

  • The circle at the bottom of the screen is the Orb. Tap it to open the menu: search, the latest note, actions for this note, and new notes from the clipboard, an image, the camera or audio.
  • Two smaller orbs appear beside it while the menu is open: Settings on the left, New note on the right.
  • The Orb takes swipes too: up for a new note, right for the latest note, left for Select mode.
  • Details in The Orb.

Finding a setting

  • Settings has a search field at the top. Type what you think the setting might be called — "dark mode", "wallpaper", "stop autocorrect", even a typo — and the matches appear, each with its official name and the page it lives on.
  • Results match descriptions too, not just names, so a guess usually works. Tap one and Antinote walks you there: the page's row flashes and opens, a sub-page does the same, then the setting's row scrolls into view and flashes, so you also learn where it lives for next time.

The Quickbar

  • The bar above the keyboard is the Quickbar. It holds the buttons you use most — special keyboards, checklists, dictation, text capture — and you choose what goes on it.
  • Details in The Quickbar.

First-run setup

  • A fresh install opens on a full-page flow: the free-trial page first (Start free trial, or Unlock now), then three screens that set the app up before the first note opens. Make it yours notices whether your phone is in light or dark mode and offers four wallpapers (none, and three of the default backgrounds for that mode) and the same three themes for that mode everyone sees; each applies as you tap it, with a preview up top, and Settings › Appearance has the rest. Continuing also gives your slotted notes a theme of their own — Sandworm in light mode, Sultan in dark — so the two stacks tell apart at a glance; Settings › Appearance › Slotted theme changes or clears it. Swipe right on any setup screen to go back and change an earlier answer, and swipe left to return to a screen you have already answered. A wallpaper picked here is set faint and sharp, cropped to the phone's shape with its subject in the bottom-right corner; Settings › Appearance can change all of that.
  • Choose your AI provider decides whether the onboarding includes AI: Use our free demo key (a short black sheet first says where the text goes — through antinote.io to the named service and model — and that it is 20 calls meant for the onboarding; Continue is the consent, and Details under the cards shows the same sheet again), Add own key (pick a service, paste the key, keep the suggested model or choose another), or I don't want AI features — which hides every AI button and setting in the app and says so in a dialog. Turn them back on under Settings › AI › Hide AI features. A card you already chose shows a green chevron and still opens.
  • I love dictation picks dictation: Use Parakeet v3 (the button fills up as the download runs, with only Cancel download beside it, and reads Start onboarding when the model is ready — and while it downloads a tiny game appears: a sparrow on a platform over the water, a course of ASCII pillars, tunnels, trees, stalactites and gates that speeds up as you score, an orb to tap to fly, and a score / best box in the corner; it stays after the download), Use Apple Dictation, or I don't care about dictation. Either real choice means the first Dictate tap just dictates.
  • An interrupted setup picks up where it stopped on the next launch. To run it again: Settings › Tutorials › First-run setup › Reset.

The first notes

  • A fresh install opens in the tutorial: twenty short notes that teach by doing, kept in a space of their own on the phone — never synced, and never mixed with your real notes, so an install on a phone that already has notes in iCloud still gets a clean tutorial (and a factory-reset phone too). Your own notes wait in their own space until you leave. The first half you read: a welcome, a list note with checkboxes (tick Text from images there if you want the photo step later in the tour; left unticked, that note is dropped once the guided half begins), a math note with worked examples, a note on variables, then sum, avg and count, and a timer note to try a five-minute countdown on. Swipe right through them; edit them, delete them, or let them auto-delete.
  • The second half you do, with hint pills asking for each move. On the math notes, raising the keyboard shows a hint pointing at the Math keyboard button, which lights up in the hint's colour (every button a hint asks for does). From the list of first-person traits on: swipe the Orb left into Select mode, pick three or four that describe you, copy them, swipe the Orb up for a new note and paste it (a blank line is dropped under the paste for you; no pills interrupt). Then tap the Quickbar's dictation button and answer what you are hoping for in the coming year (the magic words are off for this one; stopping just stops) — tap the custom prompt button and "Turn into plan" (the hint hangs right under that row; the next one waits a few seconds after the plan lands), swipe the Quickbar to change bars, and pull down on the note to search for "hope". Search opens with the field ready to type; the banner stays above the results until you have typed "ho" (it comes back if the typing wanders off), and "Now open this note" points up at the highlighted one. That note leads into a checklist, a locked note (unlock it with Face ID, or just swipe past) and one short note about having opened it, then a photo note that asks for the camera button, and a shopping note that takes you into the slotted stack (tap the Orb, tap Slotted): wander the slots as you like, the two-finger hint follows, and two fingers on the screen bring the stack back — straight to the note about two-finger taps. Then the Ta-Da, and a couple of notes past it for the curious. Leaving the timer note stops a demo timer you started there. While a swipe hint is up the note stays read-only and the Orb only answers the swipe it is asking for; while a bar hint is up the other Quickbar buttons just say "you can play with this later". Every step holds its note: swiping to another one, swiping past the newest to make a note, or picking anything in the Orb menu but Leave tutorial answers "You can do that later! For now, …" with the step's ask (as the hint where one is up, as a pill while you are still reading). The slots trip is the exception — wander the slots freely. From the paste on, each step also refuses the moves that would leave it half-done — the hint shakes and repeats its ask. Tapping the Orb always opens its menu, so Leave tutorial is never more than a tap away. Tap any hint to hide it for the session; that frees everything until the next launch. Reopening the app mid-tutorial asks what to do: Resume tour picks up at the step you left, Restart tour brings the notes back fresh, Go to app takes you to your own notes.
  • Leaving: the Ta-Da says so; the Orb menu carries a red Leave tutorial capsule above its panel the whole time the tutorial space is open; and from the Ta-Da on, a small Tutorial mode pill sits bottom-left on every tutorial note, ephemeral or slotted — tap it to leave (or cancel). Leaving opens your own notes — the space you came back to is exactly as you left it, down to which note and which slot were showing — and iCloud sync, paused while the tutorial was up, picks up again. If you wrote anything while the tutorial was open — notes of your own, or a tutorial note or slot you typed into — leaving asks whether to keep those edits: Bring them with me lands them as ordinary notes at the end of your stack (a pill says how many) where they sync like the rest, Start from scratch leaves them behind. A note shared into Antinote or a widget tap while the tutorial is open waits for your notes too; a widget, Shortcut or link into the app leaves the tutorial by itself.
  • Already use Antinote on a Mac or another iPhone? Once your notes are found in iCloud, a sheet asks whether you want the iOS onboarding or would rather skip it — skipping just leaves the tutorial and opens your own notes.
  • To see the tutorial again: Settings › Tutorials › Launch onboarding tutorial. It launches with its own set of notes and preferences; your notes and settings stay as they are. Beside it, Recover notes written in the tutorial is for notes a version before 1.73 left behind in the tutorial when you left it: it moves them into your own notes (or says there is nothing to recover). Use it before launching the tutorial again, which starts the tutorial's notes over. It runs the setup screens first — look, AI, dictation — with your current choices marked (and a card to keep anything already set up that the screens don't offer), then starts over from the first step with a fresh set of notes, on the standard Quickbars — your own Quickbars are set aside, untouched, and come back when you leave. The same page has Games (any download game you have seen), Tips (reset the first-run setup, hints and tips to show again next time) and Confirmations: Deleting a note, Clearing a note and Stopping a timer, each Ask or Don't ask — where a "Don't show again" is undone. The dictation and read-aloud setups open from Settings › Dictation and Settings › Read aloud, and What's new from Settings › About.