I’ve been hearing about Octarine for a while. It’s one of those apps that people whose opinions I respect talk about with a certain level of admiration. After testing it as thoroughly as I’ve tested any app in a long time, I understand why.

Octarine is a tool for creating, editing, and organizing text-based information using connected but independent documents: Markdown files. Without relying on plugins, it supports images, video, PDFs, and files created by other productivity apps. Those files can be linked inside Octarine but still open in their native applications.

Octarine isn’t designed for a single purpose. It’s more like a flexible Markdown workspace you can adapt to several overlapping uses:

• Journaling
• Task management
• Writing and long-form drafting
• Math or science reference notes
• Documentation
• Personal knowledge management (PKM)
• Project planning

Setup

Octarine is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, but it’s not a heavy Electron app. The download is just over 30 MB, and it launches as fast as TextEdit; effectively instant.

The interface is tab-based, similar to a web browser. It isn’t strictly native macOS UI, but it’s clean, responsive, and supports customizable themes.

Installation on the Mac is simple:

1. Open the downloaded DMG
2. Drag Octarine.app into /Applications

That’s it.

When you launch it for the first time, Octarine asks you to open or create a Workspace. A workspace is simply a folder of Markdown files; either ones you create or notes that already exist somewhere on your Mac.

Structure

You can download, install, and configure Octarine in well under a minute and immediately start creating documents.

A key design choice is that Octarine uses the filesystem directly. Your workspace is just a folder containing Markdown files with human-readable filenames.

That means:

• You can manage files directly in Finder
• You can open them in any text editor
• Octarine will immediately reflect changes made elsewhere

I verified this by opening a note in Typora, adding a table, and watching it render instantly inside Octarine.

Because everything lives in normal folders and Markdown files, syncing is straightforward. You can use:

• iCloud Drive
• Google Drive
• Syncthing
• GitHub repositories (built-in integration)

The Git support also provides versioning for people who want a real audit trail for their notes.

Like most PKM-oriented tools, Octarine supports wikilinks. Typing [[ opens a searchable list of notes in the workspace. If you bracket a title that doesn’t exist yet, Octarine offers to create the note.

There’s also a knowledge graph showing connections between notes. Just remember: posting screenshots of your graph online costs you several internet credibility points.

Formatting

Most formatting tools are accessible through a slash command menu (/), which exposes a wide range of Markdown and extended elements:

• Headers
• Text styles (bold, italic, strikethrough)
• Callouts
• Code blocks
• Mermaid diagrams
• LaTeX
• Dividers
• Tables
• Colored text
• Dates
• Links
• Templates

You could easily use Octarine purely as a writing tool. It’s a full Markdown editor with live rendering similar to apps like Typora.

Under the hood, however, the file remains a plain text Markdown document. You can open it in BBEdit, import it into Obsidian, or process it with any other Markdown tool.

Octarine also converts pasted HTML into Markdown, preserving elements such as headers, links, bullet lists, and text styles.

Organization

The left sidebar provides a file tree for navigating your workspace. Nested folders work exactly as you’d expect.

When you attach files such as images or PDFs to a note, Octarine automatically creates folders to store them.

Octarine also supports seven types of metadata, which can be used to organize and filter notes.

The most powerful organizational feature is something called Views.

Views are dynamic, database-style tables that display notes based on filters, sorting rules, and custom columns.

Think of them as smart saved searches that update automatically as your notes change.

Tagging is also well implemented. Tags are clickable throughout the interface, and a Tag Manager provides a centralized list of every tag in your workspace.

AI Integration (Pro Version)

Octarine includes optional AI integration.

It works with:

• Local models via Ollama and LM Studio
• Apple Intelligence
• Cloud APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini

AI operates within the context of the current note, allowing it to generate, rewrite, summarize, or refine content.

Like most AI writing workflows, the real learning curve comes from developing reusable prompts that produce consistent results.

Pro users can also download a 90 MB local model that can index an entire workspace to provide additional context-aware features:

• Context indicators

Each message shows the sources used (folders, notes, or date filters). Icons and hover cards reveal the details.

• References

A list shows which notes were consulted to answer your query.

• Export options

Responses can be copied as Markdown or plain text.

• Chat titles

Titles are generated automatically after the first response and can be edited using the Sparkles icon.

• Save the chat

Clicking the Create Note icon in the chat breadcrumb saves the conversation as a note. Your questions become blockquotes, with each Q&A pair separated by a divider.

An Opinion on an Opinionated App

There’s no question that Octarine is powerful.

As someone who has spent years building PKM systems, I can appreciate how much functionality is available without needing plugins or complex setup. Many of the features Octarine includes by default require significant configuration in something like Obsidian.

That simplicity removes a lot of early decisions that intimidate people exploring tools like this.

Octarine is developed by a single developer, which might give some users pause. Personally, it doesn’t worry me much. Some of the most respected Mac utilities come from solo developers, including:

• Keyboard Maestro
• Hazel
• BetterTouchTool
• Rectangle Pro

Looking at Octarine’s update history, development is clearly active and responsive to feedback.

The changelog shows frequent updates, and the roadmap includes plans for:

• iOS and Android versions
• One-click publishing
• Quick capture tools
• Task-management improvements
• Browser extensions

…and quite a bit more.

With the exception of AI features, most of Octarine’s functionality is available in the free version.

The Pro license currently costs $70 (early-bird supporter pricing) and unlocks all current and future features. That isn’t cheap, but it’s roughly in line with other established writing tools like iA Writer ($69) or utilities such as TextSoap ($45).

For users who want a structured Markdown workspace without the plugin rabbit hole, Octarine is definitely worth a serious look.

2026-04-01 - Recent Changes

• Bullet lists and task lists with nested children now show a collapse chevron on hover — click it to fold the nested items out of sight, keeping long outlines manageable.
• • Collapse state (headings, codeblocks, lists & tasks) are persisted automatically, so collapsed sections stay collapsed when you restart the app.

Performance

• Significantly reduced CPU and memory usage across the app — typing, idle, and workspace switching are all lighter.
• Improved workspace watching functions to be more performant and less power consuming.
• Reduced CPU spikes during workspace indexing.
• Embedding pruning for large workspaces is now much faster.

Improvements

• Date cells in Views now respect your preferred date format.
• Ask Octarine & Writing Assistant now shows error messages as toasts when something goes wrong, instead of failing silently.
• The task migration flow uses fewer file operations, making it faster and more reliable.

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• Pali Canon Summary (PDF, 2013)

• Consanguinity Table (PDF, 2018)

• Celsius to Fahrenheit Cheat Sheet (PDF, 2024)

This is a simple tool that generates five paragraphs of random “pseudo-English” text having structure and letter frequency similar to that of English language. The current implementation returns five paragraphs of random text with these characteristics:

<?php echo 'hello'; ?>

• Each paragraph has between 8 and 12 sentences.
• Each sentence has between 5 and 15 words.
• Each word has between 3 and 7 letters.

What is this good for? I suppose it’s good for Greeking, sort of like what Lorem Ipsum does, but in fake English rather than fake Latin.

Technical Details

The back-end code is loosely based on a Perl script I wrote years ago. That script was more of a multi-purpose command-line tool for generating (potentially large volumes of) test data. For this tiny project, I really just wanted to test creating an AWS Lambda function exposed as a simple ReST API.

You are welcome to download and use my buttons to link back to any of my blogs!

Film Simulation Recipes

Other FujiFilm Stuff

• 2026 Print-ready ISO Week Calendar
  • Past Years: 2022, 2023, 2024 2025

• TPS Frequency Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese

• Eating the Dragon, a three-book Chinese character frequency reference guide

• More Chinese Language Resources

• Demystyfying Generative Artificial Intelligence, slides to accompany a presentation I delivered at a meeting of IT architects (PDF, 2024)

• Assessing Classification Model Performance Using the Confusion Matrix, a quick reference for Data Mining students (PDF, upd. 2024)

• Choosing a Hypothesis Test (aka “The Burkhardt Chart”), a quick reference for Statistics students (PDF, upd. 2025)

Resurf is a clever new app, currently in beta, with a lot of potential. This is one of those “I needed an app to do X, so I built one” projects; the difference is that it was built by a design engineer who clearly understands macOS conventions. The result feels native and thoughtfully put together.

Using it brought back a few workflow habits I haven’t used since the days when Evernote was king.

The entry point into Resurf is a floating capture widget that you trigger with a shortcut. From there you can use either the mouse or the keyboard to capture five types of content, with some overlap:

• Notes
• Links
• Screenshots (using a built-in capture tool)
• Media
• Voice memos

The same widget also provides a Spotlight-style search across your Resurf vault, which is essentially the folder where everything you capture is stored.

Practical Use Cases

There are several ways Resurf can fit into a real workflow.

• Screenshot organizer
  A quick way to capture, store, and resurface reference screenshots without littering your desktop with files named Screenshot 2026-03-21 at 10.43.11.png.
• Bookmarks and lightweight browser
  Links can open directly inside Resurf so you can skim content without switching to a browser. Eligible pages default to Reader View with adjustable font sizes, but you can switch to a standard page view or send the link to your default browser.
• Scratchpad
  If you need a fast place to dump temporary information, Resurf works well as a searchable scratchpad. You can open straight into the notes interface and start typing.
• Quick notes staging area
  Once the shortcut becomes muscle memory, it’s easy to use Resurf for quick capture even if you keep your long-term notes somewhere else. When something turns out to be worth keeping, the macOS share sheet makes it simple to move it into another app.

Organizing Your Data

A Resurf vault can live in iCloud, in another synced folder like Dropbox, or locally on your Mac. If you use iCloud, you’ll be able to pair the Mac version with the upcoming iOS app.

You can also maintain multiple vaults, each located anywhere in your file system.

Within a vault, Resurf provides several ways to organize what you capture:

• Inbox / Later
  If you don’t want to categorize items during capture, everything can go into an Inbox for later triage. There’s also a Later folder for items you want to defer organizing.
• Areas
  Areas function much like folders and can hold any content type.
• Tags
  Tags can be created during capture. The sidebar includes both a tag browser and a dedicated tag view.
• Pins
  Any item can be pinned to the top of its area.
• Voice memo export for transcription
  Voice memos can be exported to the file system, making it easy to run them through a transcription tool and turn them into text documents.

Nice Touches

A few small details show that the developer thought about real usage rather than just features.

• Share Sheet support
  Resurf stores notes internally as JSON rather than plain files, but exporting content to other apps is straightforward through the macOS share sheet.
• Open In
  Similar to the share sheet; lets you send items directly to another app.
• Instant Markdown rendering
  Markdown renders automatically without switching between edit and preview modes.
• Slash commands
  Formatting can be applied quickly using slash commands.
• Notes about notes
  Every captured item can include an attached note, which is handy for adding context to screenshots, links, or media.
• Chrome extension
  Lets you save links directly from the browser.

Feature Requests

Resurf is still early in development, and there are a few capabilities that would make it significantly more powerful.

• Support for clickable internal links to things like Mail messages or Obsidian notes
• The ability to attach arbitrary documents to notes
• Inline images inside notes (currently you can only add notes about images)
• Shortcuts and AppleScript support
• A Safari extension

Privacy

You can read the full policy here:
https://resurf.so/privacy

Regardless of where your vault lives, your data remains private. The app only contacts Resurf’s servers to validate your license. According to the developer, no identifying information or user content is transmitted during that process or afterward.

The company is based in Canada. Because they never see your data, GDPR provisions around data access, portability, and deletion are largely irrelevant in this case.

Price

$39

• One-time purchase at the early supporter price. Unlimited captures. Any updates we release are free for 2 years after stable release.
• Unlimited captures
• Mac app license (up to 2 Macs)
• All beta updates included
• Any updates released are free for 2 years after stable release
• Priority email support

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Some small utilities become so embedded in my workflow that they start to feel like part of macOS itself. When I sit down at someone else’s Mac or a freshly set-up machine and they aren’t there, it genuinely throws me off.

I’m curious what apps fall into that category for you.

Shareful

One of those apps for me is Shareful by Sindre Sorhus.

The Mac share menu has always felt like an afterthought compared to iOS. Many developers don’t bother implementing it, and Apple keeps it oddly limited. Shareful fixes that by adding a few practical actions that save me a surprising number of clicks every day:

• Copy
• Open In
• Save As…
• Save to Downloads

It’s simple, but once you have it, the default share sheet feels incomplete without it.

Start by Innovative Bytes

Even though I’m very much a keyboard-launcher person (Team Raycast), there are situations where that approach breaks down.

Sometimes I need a small, obscure utility whose name I can’t remember. When your /Applications folder is as crowded as mine, scrolling through it isn’t realistic.

That’s where Start from Innovative Bytes comes in. Two features make it especially useful.

• Tagging
  Tagging lets you create categories for apps without any friction. You can even nest them, like Utilities/Screenshots or Utilities/Clipboard, which makes browsing a large app library much more manageable.
• Notes
  You can attach a short description to an app so you remember what it actually does.

A good example is the file-conversion utility Consul, which lets you change an image’s format just by renaming it. Seeing a note like “file rename / conversion” when browsing makes it much easier to find again later.

Honorable Mentions

• Apparency – The App That Opens Apps — a Quick Look extension and inspection utility for applications
• CleanShot X — the screenshot tool whose keyboard shortcuts are permanently burned into my muscle memory; although ScreenFloat is starting to make a case for itself

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I’ve become quite fond of Consul, a relatively new file conversion utility that’s both simple to use and easy to automate. The concept is almost absurdly straightforward: change the file extension to the format you want and the conversion just happens.

You might think you’ll never really need to convert files from one format to another. In practice, that assumption tends to collapse sooner or later. A few situations I’ve run into over the years:

• Switching from one e-reader (for example, Sony) to another (Kindle) and suddenly needing to convert an entire library of books.
• My photography workflow revolves around Canon’s RAW format (CR2). When a relative passed away and I inherited his photo archive, the files were a mix of several other RAW formats.
• After living through the minor apocalypse when Microsoft killed Works, you’d think I would have learned something about proprietary formats. Instead, I spent another twenty years writing in Word before finally switching to Markdown.
• Occasionally grabbing an iPhone photo and realizing it exported as HEIC, which remains incompatible with far more things than it should be.
• Optimizing photos and video for my blog or social media.

There are plenty of ways to convert files. Most of them involve some level of friction:

• Opening an app (Word, for example) and using File → Save As to create another copy in a different format.
• Uploading files to random conversion websites with unclear privacy policies.
• Using powerful utilities like Permute, which are excellent but come with a bit of a learning curve.
• Building your own workflow with Apple Shortcuts if you enjoy assembling that kind of plumbing.

What makes Consul such a pleasure is the complete absence of friction. It runs quietly in the background, and when you need to convert something, it just happens the moment you rename the file. For most conversions, the default settings are fine, but in the settings, you can control exactly how each conversion is handled including the output quality and codec, or whether to strip metadata.

For Mac automation nerds, Consul can be set to watch folders and perform conversions when a certain file type lands there. You can use Consul with Hazel or another automation tool like Crank to route the converted file elsewhere, import it into Photos or upload it to an FTP server.

Consul currently supports 1,391 conversions across 76 file formats, covering images, audio, video, documents, e-books, email, configuration files, spreadsheets, and archives.

The developer’s site suggests more formats are planned. I’d particularly like to see support for Apple iWork files and OpenOffice spreadsheets and presentations. My pie-in-the-sky request would be a PDF → EPUB conversion that performs better than what Calibre currently produces.

Pricing is refreshingly simple. A single license is $14, and a three-seat license is $19, both including a year of updates.

The privacy policy is exactly what you want to see: no data collection. Email support is available, and the developer is active on Reddit and notably friendly when people have questions.

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