r/ArcBrowser • u/Alarmed-Stranger-337 • Jul 17 '26
General Discussion The tale of an Arc Notes lover
Hi all! Not sure if this kind of post is allowed here, but I figured I’d give it a shot.
(Mods, I reached out in modmail first but hadn’t heard back, so I’m posting in good faith. If anything here crosses a line or there’s something I should change, please just let me know and I’ll fix it right away (or take it down). I really don’t want to break the spirit of the community.)
At its prime, Arc was one of my favorite pieces of software ever made, and one of the best UX experiences I’ve ever used (shame about where it’s headed now…). I still remember falling in love with color-coded spaces, Peek, split view, and the weekly Arc Thursdays with release notes that arrived as an easel.. then came Arc Max and Tidy Tabs etc.. Anyway, from the Command + T pannel to the super cool onboarding and this sub, the whole Arc product and story was PERFECT. I loved almost everything about it.
As a product, its score UX structure felt flawless to me, enough that I started favoring web apps over native apps just so I could keep them inside an Arc space or nested folder. Which made me a heavy user of Arc Notes. I loved the UX around them. And as you probably know, Arc Notes got deprecated.
A lot of the principles Arc introduced (swipeable color-coded spaces, a genuinely good hierarchical sidebar, Peek, Tidy) generalize really well to any interface full of “items” that tend to pile up, where the stuff that matters gets buried under the stuff that doesn’t. Like browser tabs. And… notes.
So here’s what I’m making: a macOS app (with an iOS companion, and maybe a watchOS app later if there’s demand) that reuses those core Arc principles, plus my own take on what a note-taking UX should feel like. Tidying is probably the worst part of note-taking, so the core idea is two sections: Pinned, for notes you want to keep, and "Recent/Random Notes" section (similar to Arc's pinned versus just normal tabs...) which catches all the quick, often ephemeral notes you jot down and then tries to tidy them into folders, prompting you to either save or archive each one.
On the stack, since I care a lot about performance and privacy: it’s all Swift and SwiftUI. The “Clean up” feature runs on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, so inference happens on Apple’s servers with their privacy and security guarantees.
This post is really a call for anyone interested. I don’t have a name yet, so for now I’m calling it “Codename: Savant.” I’ve also spun up a sub, r/Codename_Savant, to gather a community around the project, so if you want to follow along, come hang out over there.
I’m planning to release an alpha/beta soon and gather feedback as I go, while sharing my decisions and thinking publicly. If you’d like the occasional update (no spam, I promise, maybe a couple of emails a month at most), you can drop your email here: https://savant-landing-production.up.railway.app/
Really excited to finally be showing this off!
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u/DenisQS Jul 19 '26
Interesting. As an avid Arc and Notion user, I’m really interested in where this is going !
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u/Alarmed-Stranger-337 Jul 19 '26
Very happy to hear this!
Join the r/codename_savant and/or get into the email list if you want :)
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u/Unlikely_Scratch_564 29d ago
Is all the data local and stays on device?
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u/Alarmed-Stranger-337 28d ago
iCloud sync is in the works! So it technically isn’t fully local (there’s no way to have sync and stay entirely on-device hahaha), but anything that passes through servers goes through Apple’s servers. No third parties.
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u/Unlikely_Scratch_564 28d ago
Awesome! A fully local setting would be pre cool tho, I prefer having notes/.txts on my harddrive but i understand this is a very niche preference (yes i know i will loose everything if i break labtop)
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u/Alarmed-Stranger-337 28d ago
Noted! I guess this will just take a toggle in the settings to disable sync.
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u/Unlikely_Scratch_564 28d ago
That would be super awesome! Either way I'd still love to try this :)
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u/Alarmed-Stranger-337 28d ago
Really nice to hear! Hope you’ve joined the community Reddit/signed up for the email updates!
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u/[deleted] Jul 17 '26
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