PortaCue for Obsidian

Version 1.0. Talk to your locked phone and it lands in today's note. Tick a task from the Home Screen and it writes straight to your vault. No app launch, no wait.

Your Obsidian vault, finally fast on a phone.

PortaCue opens the same folder Obsidian does and writes the same plain Markdown files. No account, no sync service, no import, no database. Point it at your vault and every capture lands in today's note, timestamped and filed, before you lower the phone.

CAPTURE BEFORE THE THOUGHT GOES • Press the Action button with the phone still locked and talk. The Dynamic Island shows it recording. • Tap the widget, ask Siri, or use the share sheet from any app. • Speak from your Apple Watch with the phone in another room. It weaves in when the phone catches up. • Type an entry straight into the note, with an optional place stamp. Every route ends in the same place: a line in your daily note.

SPEECH THAT NEVER LEAVES THE DEVICE Apple's engine, Whisper (many languages, even mixed mid-sentence) and Parakeet all run on this phone. No audio is uploaded. Ever. Local models cost storage, not money.

PHOTOS THAT BECOME TEXT Photograph a whiteboard, a page or a receipt. Vision reads it on-device and saves clean, searchable Markdown beside the image. Lists and tables are restored and the raw text is always kept. A business card, address, flyer or book cover can file itself as a structured note in People, Places, Events or Books.

TASKS, IN THE FORMAT YOUR VAULT ALREADY USES "Call the plumber tomorrow at five, urgent" becomes a real vault task with due date, time, priority, repeats and subtasks, always previewed before anything is written. Compatible with the Tasks and TaskNotes line formats. • Home Screen and StandBy widgets. Ticking a task writes to the vault in place, without launching the app. • Lock Screen reminders with Complete, Start, Snooze and Add note. • Focus sessions run as a Live Activity with a countdown and a progress ring. • A full task editor, plus a ledger of planned load, streaks and where the hours go.

YOUR VAULT TALKS BACK • The Daily Brief: overdue, due today, your routines, and what your notes say about today. Ask Siri for it. • Ask your vault: answers cite the exact lines they came from. On-device by default. Cloud is strictly opt-in, with your own key. • Ask anything: a general chat that can attach the notes you choose, fill a template, and save the answer as a note. • Wikilinks woven for you: mentions of your notes become [[links]], conservatively, so ambiguous titles never link.

THE SHELF: SAVE NOW, READ LATER Share a link and it becomes a readable note in your vault: title, essence and links to related notes. Read aloud, resume where you stopped, keep a verdict. Video links arrive with their transcript and chapters.

SNIPPETS The paragraphs you write again and again, keyed by one word, with blanks that fill themselves. Reachable from Siri, Spotlight and Shortcuts.

OUR TABLE: SHARED, WITH ONE OTHER PERSON A household inbox as real files in a folder you already share: lists, logs, plans and boards, each capture stamped with who wrote it. Siri opens any list by name. A device-local Face ID lock guards what you choose.

ON EVERY SCREEN YOU OWN iPad gets a standing sidebar and the Brief on a rail. Apple Watch records on its own. Mono is the default look: the day as a printed page on warm, neutral or dark stock. System, Light and Dark are there if you prefer colour.

PRIVACY PortaCue has no account and no analytics. It collects nothing. Your notes are files on your disk and in your own iCloud, and nothing else. Cloud features are off until you turn them on with your own API key, stored in the Keychain.

Requires iOS 26. PortaCue reads and writes ordinary Markdown files in a folder you choose, and works with any such folder whether or not another app is installed.

PortaCue is an independent app and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Obsidian. Obsidian is a trademark of its respective owner.