Sideleaf

You're halfway through an email when a phone number, a tracking code or a half-formed idea turns up. It needs to go somewhere fast, and it needs to still be there in an hour. Open a full notes app and you've lost your place. Leave a sticky on the desktop and it's buried under six windows by lunch.

Sideleaf's answer is to park notes in a deck along one edge of the screen. Pull one out when you need it, and it tucks back when you're done. Reminders slide out of the same edge. Any note can also open in a window of its own, and an All Notes window gathers the lot when you've lost track of which note held what.

The maker is Madanu Akash, an independent developer, and the site describes buying the app as supporting "one person building something small and careful." That fits what's on show. There's even a browser demo that mimics the edge deck, so you can get a feel for it before installing anything.

Notes aren't only plain text. Type a pair of square brackets and you get a checklist, with Tab for a sub-item. Select text in another app and the Services menu can send it straight to a new note. If you'd like to find notes from Spotlight, there's a setting for that.

On Macs that support Apple Intelligence, three actions appear: tidy up, fix spelling, or turn a note into a checklist. They run on the Mac itself. When you want your notes somewhere else, every one exports as Markdown, plain text or rich text, which is a nice touch in an app this small. The app needs macOS 26 or later.

You get seven days with every feature, no card and no account. After that it's a single payment through the Mac App Store, $9.99, with a $6.99 launch price that the site says lasts for the first two weeks. There's no subscription. If you never pay, nothing gets deleted. Your notes turn read-only, and you can still search and export them. That's a kinder ending than most trials offer.

According to the privacy policy, last updated November 8, 2026, the app collects nothing and has no analytics, ads or crash reporting of its own. Notes are stored only on your Mac, encrypted with AES-256, with the key in your keychain. One detail is worth knowing before you flip the Spotlight switch. macOS then keeps its own searchable copy of your notes' text, outside Sideleaf's encryption, though still on your Mac. The App Store label reads Data Not Collected.

If your desktop is a graveyard of half-read stickies, the seven-day trial is an easy way to see whether an edge deck suits how you work.