Launching today
Zen Slate
Notes, todos, voice notes and scans. Private by design.
6 followers
Notes, todos, voice notes and scans. Private by design.
6 followers
Zen Slate is a private writing app for iPhone and iPad. Write rich-text notes, draw with Apple Pencil, capture voice notes with on-device transcription, scan documents, manage todos, and keep earlier drafts. No account. Optional iCloud sync.
Hello Everyone! 👋 I’m Kumar, and I built Zen Slate.
A page of ideas often comes with things to do, a document to keep and a thought that is easier to say than type. Zen Slate gives them a place together on iPhone and iPad. A slate is your page: write on it, add what you need, and organize it when it helps.
✅ Todos that stay inside your writing
This is the part I’d especially love you to try. A checklist item can have a date, reminder, priority, sub-items or repeat. It stays in the slate where you wrote it and also appears in your todo list. So the next step sits beside the explanation, the plan or the meeting details that gave it meaning. A month view lets you see what is coming up, and you can optionally mirror todos into Apple Reminders.
✍️ Room for more than typed words
Write with headings, quotes, highlights, code blocks and checklists. Add photos with captions, attach files and PDFs, or scan a paper document with the camera. Record a voice note inside a slate and read its transcription without sending the audio away to be understood.
On iPad, draw with Apple Pencil using pens, pencils, markers, an eraser, lasso and ruler. Sketches stay editable. For longer writing, focus mode keeps the current line in place, with word count and reading time available when you want them.
🔎 Find things again as your library grows
Keep related slates in nested categories, use tags across them, and bookmark the pages you return to. Search your writing, save a search as a smart folder, or link one slate to another. Backlinks show which other slates point to the page you are reading. You can also leave a slate unfiled and carry on writing.
🔒 Your writing, on your device
There is no Zen Products account to create. Your writing stays on your device, and optional sync runs through your own iCloud account. Your words never touch a server of ours. Voice transcription happens on-device too. You can lock an individual slate with Face ID.
Version history lets you read and restore recent drafts. To be precise about the limit, it keeps up to 30 days or 50 versions, whichever comes first.
📥 Bring your existing writing
Import a folder of Markdown with its folder structure, tags and dates preserved. Evernote, RTF and HTML imports are supported too. You can start with a small set of slates and see how the app fits your work before moving more over.
🎁 Five slates free. Pro can be bought once.
The free plan gives you five slates. Pro removes that limit and adds iCloud sync, widgets, backup and export. Choose a one-time purchase that never renews, or a yearly subscription. Pro also lets you export your writing as JSON.
Download Zen Slate for iPhone or iPad and try it with something you are already working on. Add a page, a voice note and a reminder to the same slate. I’d love to hear what works for you and where it still gets in your way. Thanks for giving it a try!