Now on the App Store: visualOS canvas, native and fully offline. Pay once, use forever — no subscription, no account. A canvas for minds who think visually.
visualOS is an infinite canvas for people who think visually. It is an infinite canvas for notes, folders, images, to-do’s and sketches. It works fully offline and saves to real files in a folder on your device.
YOUR DATA IS A FOLDER YOU CAN OPEN
Connect any folder on your disk and visualOS mirrors your canvas into it — every folder on the canvas is a real folder, every document a Markdown file, every image an image. Put the folder in iCloud or Dropbox and it syncs through your cloud, not ours. If you ever leave, everything stays readable. Forever.
OFFLINE ISN'T A MODE. IT'S THE ARCHITECTURE.
On a flight, on the train, in a studio with no signal — visualOS doesn’t care. There is no server to reach, so there is no spinner, no sync wheel, no login wall. Your canvas opens instantly because everything is already here.
BOARDS WITHIN BOARDS
Any board can hold more boards. A project becomes a world: moodboards inside client boards inside your studio. Drag elements into a board to file them away; breadcrumbs keep you oriented; a double-tap takes you deeper.
NO ACCOUNT. NO SUBSCRIPTION.
Open it and work. There's nothing to sign up for, nothing to verify, nothing to cancel. Pay once and it's yours forever — one purchase unlocks every Apple device.
FREE IN THE BROWSER BUT THE APP GOES FURTHER
Try visualOS free in your browser at visualos.app. When you're ready for it everywhere, the app adds what a browser can't: true offline access on the train or a plane, native pan-and-zoom gestures, Apple Pencil drawing, and your boards saved as real files that sync across iPhone, iPad and Mac through your own iCloud.
EVERYTHING ELSE
• Notes & rich text
• Long-form documents stored as plain Markdown
• Interactive to-do lists on the canvas
• Images & PDFs — drag, paste or drop them in
• Freehand drawing
• Magnetic arrows that snap and bend
• Search every board at once
• Groups, locking and a snap grid
Your ideas. Your files.
ABOUT US
As creatives, we’ve always relied on visual canvas tools to organize our thoughts, plan projects, and make sense of ideas. But one thing kept bothering us: our files and knowledge were always tied to cloud-based services. We wanted the freedom to access everything offline, without worrying about losing our work or giving up our privacy. So why can’t our own files on our device be visualized in the same intuitive way? And that’s how the idea for visualOS was born: a visual representation of your internal folder structure — offline, private, and secure. Your data stays on your device, where it belongs.
We’re Sarah and Gerald, a husband-and-wife team who have been living, loving, and building things together for more than 20 years. Creating visualOS has been a ton of fun and thanks to AI we were able to push it further than we initially imagined.
Now we’d love to hear what you think. If visualOS helps you work a little more creatively or makes your files easier to navigate, we’d be grateful if you shared it with others.
This is an amazing tool! I was trying to find a cheaper option than milanotes and I think visualOS is perfect! It’s also a lot better in some ways. For example I love the search bar tool that can take me anywhere and I also love the grouping feature. I especially enjoy the iCloud sync allowing me having my own copy and it being way cheaper than milanotes. It’s also better than Freeform from iOS. It has sleeker and pretty default designs (in Freeform I have to manually deaign everything) and moving around is lot smoother. It’s the small details that matter! My only concerns is that if I have too many elements it will start to lag like Freeform. On the web version it’s not perfect, there is some of zoom issue I encounter. One of which being sometime zooming in will also cause the whole web to zoom and tool bar disappear. Could be solve by refresh but with infinity canvas, zooming is gonna be done 24/7, so not having this bug will def be a great quality of life. The developers are constantly making improvements, which is always nice to look forward to!
Developer Response
Thanks a million! We have tested it with up to thousands of images and items on the board. On our test devices it did not start to lag, but if it does on your end, please write to us, and we are 100% sure to find a smart solution for this :) For the Zoom on web issue: Thanks for mentioning it! We have found out how to suppress this annoying behavior, and it will be fixed in one of our next updates.
Update 2
KJ1978
This app is fantastic. I use Defter Notes (which is GREAT), and this app is similar; but will have a slight edge with a few more options. I realize you are new + still building, but please consider font options (ability to use installed fonts) + pen (size and color) options.Thank you for updating so frequently. Pls keep going!
Developer Response
Wow! Thank you for your review! These are great suggestions, and we have added them to our roadmap: https://visualos.featurebase.app/roadmap If you have something else in mind, please write to us anytime.Edit: Yes, we have already made tests with the pen options. But we want to make sure that it is polished and not rushed. We try to make it a part of the next mayor release, 1.3, but I will not promise anything.
A fantastic start.
apalehorse
I abandoned Milanote because I’m not a huge fan of a subscription for this type of product and I didn’t want my projects on someone else’s servers during development. Despite how much I enjoy that software’s feature set, these weren’t comprises I was willing to make. After searching high and low, I failed to find an equal, for my needs: most apps were focused on note taking, not visual concepts or they failed miserably with organizing projects (no nested boards/folders). Then I happened across this one. It still lacks some of the polish and elegance of the aforementioned app but it’s a very young piece of software yet already ticks most of the boxes for me. Most importantly, its projects work locally or sync via the user’s preferred cloud platform! I’d happily support further development!A few criticisms, or rather a wishlist.* Please add columns. This is a very useful tool in Milanote. Being able to add columns, color coding and nested “cards” or assets is a powerful and useful tool for organizing complex design projects* Please provide the ability to add captions under elements like images. Using notes in place of captions is a poor UX.* While the functionality of visualOS’s folders serve a similar purpose and is preferred since it’s mirrored as actual folders on the hard drive, please allow options for how they are displayed in the UI. Design is critical for those who often display their concepts to clients when pitching ideas. The folder icon is an eyesore compared to “Boards”. This may not be the case universally, so please allow alternatives.* Swatches or “Colors”. This is also important for pitch decks and mood boards. Right now, the user has to use workarounds but this is essential for an app with visual in the title. *Also, Workspace management seems clunky at the moment. Trying to delete a folder outside the app doesn’t appear to delete the related visualOS folders nor contents and retains the connected assets even after deleted on iPad. Deleting from within the software itself seems to work marginally better.I’m excited to see where this app goes, not simply because it’s a strong alternative to similar popular apps but also because it’s already this good so early on and the developers seem very responsive and open to user suggestions. Many of the other apps have seemingly plateaued whereas visualOS seems to be batting for the fences.
Love as an artist!
Darkly<3
It’s really great to get all my ideas out and organized but wish I can put multiple photos on it as it will be way easier and add color swatches for easy ideas
Developer Response
Thank you! Hearing this makes us proud. Yes, you found a bug there with the images. We can reproduce it, and the fix is on the way. We hadn't noticed it ourselves because we usually add multiple photos by dropping them straight into the connected iCloud folder on the device: they then show up in the app ready to place. 😬 That might work as a temporary workaround for you as well. And color swatches for ideas are a great idea. We've added both to our public roadmap (visualos.featurebase.app). If you have more ideas, please write to us anytime!Edit: The "multiple photos add bug" should be fixed in our newest version
- Added: Cross-references (@) between boards
- Added: Video + Audiofile support
- Added: PDF support
- Added: Multiple File input instead of image only
- Fixed: Delayed Sync on 2 native devices
- Fixed: Save to PNG
We're happy you love what we've built!
If you are missing something, please contact us anytime.
Version 1.2.51
The developer, Dorweiler & Reimertz GbR, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
Seller
Dorweiler & Reimertz GbR
Size
14.8 MB
Category
Productivity
Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
iPad Requires iPadOS 15.0 or later.
iPod touch Requires iOS 15.0 or later.
Mac Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
