Jottle Support
Help and troubleshooting for Jottle on Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
Need a person?
Email shearm@mac.com. Jottle is made by one person, so a reply may take a few days — but every message is read. It helps enormously if you say which device you were using, what you expected, and what happened instead.
Privacy questions are answered on the privacy policy page.
What Jottle is
Jottle is for the thought you need to get down before it is gone. On the Mac it is a notepad that drops in over whatever you are doing when you press a key; on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch it is a small app that opens on a blank line. Notes sync between all of them through your own iCloud account.
It is deliberately not an outliner, a wiki or a writing app. A note is a piece of plain text with a date on it. The first line becomes its title, and that is the whole model.
Requirements
- macOS 26 or later, iOS or iPadOS 26 or later, watchOS 26 or later.
- An Apple Account signed in on each device, with iCloud Drive on — that is what syncing uses. Jottle works perfectly well on a single device with iCloud off; you simply will not get sync, and the app says so in a banner rather than pretending.
- Nothing else. There is no account to create, no subscription, and no server of ours to be reachable.
- Jottle is free on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. On the Mac it is free for 14 days, then a one-time purchase. See Pricing and purchases.
On the Mac
Press ⌥ Space anywhere — in any app, over any window — and the capture panel appears, one line tall. It grows as you write. Press ⌘ ↩ to save, and Esc to put it away; anything you had not saved is still there the next time you open it.
Your notes are underneath. Press ⇥ Tab and the list appears below what you are writing; the arrow keys move through it, ↩ opens the selected note, and Esc steps back. The selected note shows Pin, Lock, Archive and Delete on its row.
Jottle on the Mac is a menu bar app: there is no Dock icon and no main window. Everything else lives in the menu-bar item — Show HUD, Search Notes, Show Archived, export and import, the lock passphrase, and Settings. Opening Jottle again from Finder or Spotlight brings up the panel.
The shortcut does nothing.
⌥ Space is a popular shortcut, and only one app can hold it. Alfred, Spotlight replacements and some window managers claim it by default. Choose another one in Settings → Global Shortcut (menu-bar item → Settings…): click the field and press the keys you want, using at least one of ⌘, ⌥ or ⌃. Jottle tells you if a combination is already taken. The menu-bar item's Show HUD always works, whatever the shortcut.
On iPhone and iPad
The iPhone app is a list and an editor. The iPad app is the same thing in two panes: notes on the left, the one you are editing on the right.
There is nothing to set up. Notes appear as iCloud delivers them.
On Apple Watch
The watch app is a real app, not a mirror of the phone — it holds its own copy of your notes and syncs directly. Tap New Note and dictate or scribble; it is saved and on its way to your other devices before you have put your wrist down.
You can read and browse your notes there too. A locked note asks for its passphrase on the watch the first time, then remembers it on that watch.
Widgets and complications
| Where | What you get |
|---|---|
| iPhone, iPad, Mac | Pinned Notes — small, medium and large. Your pinned notes on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen, Notification Centre or the Mac desktop. |
| Apple Watch | New Note — tap the watch face to dictate straight into a new note. |
| Apple Watch | Notes — how many notes you have; tap to browse. |
| Apple Watch | Recent Notes — your latest notes at a glance; tap to open one. |
Widgets update on the system's schedule, not instantly. If one looks stale, opening Jottle refreshes it.
Pinning, searching, archiving
- Pin a note to keep it at the top of the list — and to put it in the widget.
- Search matches the text of your notes. Locked notes are not searchable, because their text is encrypted and Jottle genuinely cannot read it.
- Archive a note to take it out of the main list without deleting it. Archived notes stay searchable from the Archived view.
- Find in note (⌘ F) searches within the note you are editing.
Locked notes
Any note can be locked. Its body is then encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key derived from a passphrase you choose, using PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations. The encrypted note is what syncs, so the note is unreadable everywhere except on a device where you have entered the passphrase.
There is no recovery, and this is not a bug
Jottle does not know your passphrase and neither does anyone else. There is no reset link, no backdoor, and nothing the developer can do for you. If you forget it, the contents of your locked notes are gone permanently. Choose something you will not lose, and write it down somewhere safe.
The label stays visible
When you lock a note, Jottle asks for a short label to show in the list, prefilled with the note's first line. That label is stored and synced in the clear so your locked notes stay distinguishable instead of all reading "Locked Note". The app says so at the moment you choose it. Leave it empty if you would rather it showed nothing.
Face ID and Touch ID
After you have unlocked once on a device, Jottle can keep a copy of the key in that device's Keychain, guarded by Face ID or Touch ID, so day to day you just look at the phone. The passphrase remains the real key — biometrics are a per-device convenience on top of it, and the passphrase always works.
What locking costs you
A locked note cannot be searched, cannot appear in a widget, and cannot be exported. Export writes plain text files; a locked note has no plain text to write. If you want a locked note in a backup, remove its lock first.
Sync
How long should it take?
Usually seconds, but up to about a minute is normal, and that delay is iCloud's delivery schedule rather than anything Jottle can hurry along.
A note isn't appearing on my other device.
- Check every device is signed into the same Apple Account with iCloud Drive on.
- Bring the app to the foreground — iCloud delivers more eagerly to an app in front of you.
- A device that has been offline catches up when it reconnects. Nothing is lost meanwhile.
There's an amber banner saying notes aren't syncing.
That is Jottle telling you the truth rather than failing silently: it could not reach iCloud, so it is running on a local store on this device. Your notes are safe and still there. Sign into iCloud, or turn iCloud Drive on, and the banner goes.
One very long note never syncs.
iCloud has a size limit per record. A note over roughly 800 KB of text saves locally and will not sync. Splitting it in two fixes it.
Getting notes in and out
Jottle reads and writes plain Markdown files with YAML front matter — one
note per file, carrying its created and updated dates and whether it was pinned or archived.
.md, .markdown, .txt and .text are all
accepted.
- Export note writes the note you are looking at.
- Export all notes writes a folder of them.
- Import Notes reads a folder back in.
They are ordinary text files. Open them in any editor, keep them in any backup, and you are never locked in. Locked notes are the one exception, for the reason above.
Pricing and purchases
iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch: free, with every feature. There is nothing to buy.
Mac: free for 14 days, then a one-time $9.99 (or the local equivalent) keeps it. No subscription. The first time you open the panel, choose Start Free Trial; the menu-bar item shows how many days are left.
- When the trial ends, your notes are not locked away. You can still read, search, pin, archive, delete and export them on the Mac, and they carry on syncing to your other devices. Only writing new notes and editing existing ones waits for the purchase.
- Already had Jottle on your Mac? If you downloaded it before version 1.3, it stays yours for free. There is nothing to do.
- Restore. A purchase follows your Apple Account to your other Macs by itself. If one does not show up, choose Restore on the panel or in Settings → Jottle for Mac.
- Codes. If you have been given a code, choose Redeem Code in the same places.
- Family Sharing is on, so one purchase covers your family's Macs.
- Refunds are handled by Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com. The developer cannot issue them and never sees your payment details.
Troubleshooting
Jottle says it can't open my notes.
That message means the note store could not be loaded — almost always an iCloud problem rather than a lost-data one. Check you are signed in, then reopen the app. On the Mac, that screen has a Reveal Store in Finder button if you want to see the file for yourself.
The text is too small, or too big.
Settings → Text Size. On iPhone and iPad, Settings is the sliders button in the toolbar; on the Mac, it is in the menu-bar item.
I unlocked a note and now the watch is asking again.
The biometric key cache is per device, so each one asks once. That is deliberate: a key that roamed between devices would be a weaker key.
Something is wrong that isn't here.
Please write: shearm@mac.com. Include your OS version and whether it happens on one device or all of them.
Privacy, briefly
Jottle has no backend, no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no third-party SDKs, and makes no network requests of its own. Your notes are on your devices and in your own iCloud account, and the developer has no access to them. Purchases on the Mac are handled entirely by Apple. The full statement is on the privacy policy page.