Say it. It's written.

The idea always arrives at seventy, in the middle lane, with both hands on the wheel. By the time you have parked it is gone. Car Note catches it: you say "Take a Car Note", you talk, you say "Stop Car Note". Your phone stays in your pocket the whole time.

No typing. No screen. No account. No server. iOS 17 and later.

A road, not a list.

Notes are stops along a single line, grouped by day: a serif day number, a dot for each note, your own words underneath. Not a grid of cards.

Every note carries its own waveform fingerprint, so you recognise a note by its shape before you read a word of it. It is computed once when the note is saved and stored in 64 bytes, so scrolling a year of driving never touches an audio file.

Notes title themselves from your first sentence, cut at a word boundary. Never "New Note 3". Transcripts break into paragraphs the way you actually spoke: a pause of 1.2 seconds after a finished sentence, or 2.5 seconds regardless, starts a new one.

Find it again.

Full-text search across every title and every transcript, ranked by relevance, matching on prefixes: type sup and supplier is already there. Results are typeset rather than truncated: the matching sentence, set in italic serif inside curly quotes, with your words highlighted.

Or find it by where you were: every located note as a pin on a map, with Apple's points of interest switched off so your notes are the only thing on it. Or by when: a month grid with a dot on every day you recorded.

It hears what you promised.

Say "call the supplier when I get to the office" and Car Note offers you a reminder that waits at the office. Say "book it tonight" and it offers one for eight o'clock, or whenever you have decided tonight begins.

Three typefaces for your own words. Newsreader, IBM Plex Serif, or the system font, both serifs bundled and nothing downloaded. Newsreader is driven as a real variable font, so a 56pt timer and a 17pt transcript are drawn with different letterforms rather than one face scaled up.

Red is reserved. Exactly two things use it, the recording dot and destructive actions, and whatever accent you pick nothing else competes with them. The recording dot only lights once the microphone is genuinely capturing, never a moment earlier.

VoiceOver was written for, not retrofitted. Every icon button speaks, a note reads out as one sentence with its title, time and length, and the decorative work is hidden from the screen reader instead of read out as noise.

Your words stay yours.

Most voice apps ship your voice to a data centre. Car Note has nowhere to ship it to. Across 281 Swift files there is no URLSession, no request, no socket, no endpoint — nothing that could reach a server, because there is no server to reach. There is exactly one third-party dependency, and it is a local SQLite wrapper.

Hold to talk. Press Record past 0.4 seconds for push-to-talk, release to stop.

Recording survives the lock screen and the app going to the background.

A forgotten note saves itself after five minutes paused.

"Stop Car Note" is never in your note. A command that ends a recording is stripped from the tail of the transcript.

It tolerates road noise mishearing its own name. "Passcode note", "card note" and a dozen other variants are accepted as the command.

Nothing heard while paused reaches your note. It listens so "Resume Car Note" works, and that is all.

Your music comes back. Playback ducks the car's audio and releases it the moment you leave the note.

Recently Deleted keeps notes 30 days and restores them to their original day, not the day you restored them.

Requirements

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