Tenoa

Everything you save, as files on your own disk.

Tenoa is a visual library. Images, links, videos, and notes. Each one lands in a folder on your own machine as a markdown file with the original next to it. If you delete Tenoa the library is still sitting there and stays with you.

The Tenoa library: a masonry wall of saved images, articles, videos and notes.

Every folder system I've ever set up was dead inside a month, so Tenoa doesn't ask you to file anything. Hover an image and hit save. Paste a link. Drag a file in. It's on disk before you've decided where it belongs.

Search reads the content of the thing itself, so the photo you saved at 11pm and never named still comes back when you go looking for it. It runs on your machine, and nothing gets uploaded to be indexed.

Underneath it's markdown you can open in any editor, with the images in a folder next to it. No database owns the originals. Tenoa keeps an index on top so search stays fast, and that index is throwaway, because it rebuilds itself from the files whenever it needs to.

Open anything you've saved

Tenoa reads what you save and writes it back out as text that lives in your library. What you get depends on what the thing is.

Open an image

Related images from your library come back with it, and Tenoa writes its own description of what's in the picture. You can add your own notes as well to make it easily searchable in the future.

A saved photograph open in Tenoa, with a written summary of the picture, its caption, and a grid of related images from the same library.

Your own note

Anything you write here is indexed with the item, so you can search for it in your own words later.

Summary

Tenoa writes its own description of what is in the picture. That is what makes a photo you never named turn up in a search.

More like this

Related images out of your own library. No tags, nothing you set up. Nobody filed these together.

Open a saved video

A summary and the key points, as plain text in your library. Now you can quickly skim a video for the information you need most.

A saved conference talk open in Tenoa, with a summary, a list of key points, and the video description.

Where it came from

The link it was saved from and the date stay with the file.

Summary

What the talk is actually about, in a paragraph, before you spend forty minutes on it.

Key points

The argument broken out line by line. Skim it for the part you came for.

Open a PDF or document

A summary of the contents, and the text pulled out of the document and saved as markdown next to the original.

A saved research paper open in Tenoa, with the PDF on the left and a summary plus the extracted text on the right.

Your own note

Two words here is enough. It sits at the top and it is indexed with everything else.

Summary

What the paper argues, up front, before you decide whether to read fifteen pages of it.

The text itself

The whole document pulled out as plain text and saved as markdown beside the original. This is what search reads.

Summaries either run on your own machine or go through an AI service you connect with your own key. It's a setting you control. Nothing routes through a server of mine, because there isn't one.

Build log

Fixed rendering of saved pages, which were showing raw markup instead of text. Made graph links visible. Added an excluded-sites list for the save button.

Added syncing between Mac and iPad. Checksums matched both directions in under 3 seconds.

Locked the mark and wordmark.

Named it Tenoa, from the Latin teneo (I hold).

Imported 101 items from Recall and 118 from mymind into plain files. Cancelled both subscriptions.

Tell me what's missing

I'm building what works for me, which means there's plenty I haven't thought of. If there's something you need it to do, put it here for me to consider adding.

I read them all. The ones I take on get added to the list I work from, and you'll see them turn up in the log above.

Where it is right now

September 1 is my target launch date. The local web app, the Mac app and iOS all go out that day. I use my test Mac build every day already, and I'm testing the iOS version for launch now.

Your devices sync directly to each other with nothing in the middle.

Your old library comes with you. I've pulled my own libraries from other sources and put them into my personal version. I'll keep working on making it easy for you to bring your previous libraries across.

  • Local web app
  • Mac
  • iOS / iPadOS

September 1

  • Windows installer
  • Android

Shortly after

The local web app runs in Safari, Chromium and Firefox, so Windows works from day one. What comes later is the signed installer for it, and Android.