Caute

iPhone and Mac

Caute for iPhone reaches your whole library and catches from anywhere on the phone. Caute for Mac is a small menu bar app for catching, and both bring Caute for Safari with them.

Both are coming soon to the App Store and the Mac App Store. This page describes them as they will arrive.

Signing in

Open the iPhone app and tap Sign in, or on the Mac click the Caute icon in the menu bar and choose Sign in to Caute. Caute opens in your browser, where you sign in as you do on the web and approve the app, choosing which spaces it can reach. To sign out, use Sign out in the iPhone app's Settings or in the Mac app's panel.

The iPhone app's tabs

  • Timeline: everything you've caught, newest first. The field at the top narrows it to cards holding your words. When there's a link on your clipboard, a Paste button beside it catches the link. Today sits above your cards, and you can narrow by kind, Mine or Later. Swipe a card to put it in Later or tag it, or press and hold for more.
  • Search: search by words or by meaning, ask a question of your library, or have Caute write something from it, with Search, Ask and Write. See Finding things.
  • Catch: write a thought, or use Photo, Scan or Say it.
  • Notes: your notes and highlights. See Notes.
  • Feed: the sites and newsletters you follow, apart from your library.

The bell at the top of the timeline opens Needs attention, and the avatar beside it opens Settings.

Catching on iPhone

The Share sheet. In Safari, Photos, Files or any other app, tap Share and choose Caute. The sheet shows what it's about to catch and where it will land. You can add tags or a note, then tap Catch it. For a page, Follow this site follows it in your Feed instead. If you've already caught it, the sheet says when.

The Catch tab. Write a thought and tap Catch. Tap Add tag to tag it, Photo to catch a picture, Scan to scan paper with the camera (every page goes into one PDF), or Say it to record a voice note. Caute writes down what you said once the recording reaches it.

With no signal. Anything you catch is kept on the phone first and sent when you're back online, exactly once. Settings → Kept on this iPhone shows what's waiting.

Shortcuts and Siri

Caute adds these to the Shortcuts app and Siri:

  • New note in Caute: write a thought, kept on the phone and synced.
  • Catch something in Caute: opens the Catch screen, ready to write.
  • Save text to Caute, Save the clipboard to Caute and Save a photo to Caute: catch without opening the app. A link on the clipboard becomes the page itself.
  • Search Caute: look through everything you've caught.
  • Ask Caute: ask a question of what's kept on this iPhone. It's answered on the phone, and nothing leaves it.

Widgets

Add the Today widget to your home screen or lock screen for a highlight to look at again, this day in earlier years, and what's waiting in Later. The Catch a thought widget shows what you wrote last and a way to write another.

Caute with no signal

Cards. The phone keeps the text and picture of what you caught in the last 30 days, the cards you opened lately, and every card in a tag you pinned on the web, up to a limit you choose (1 GB unless you change it). With no connection, the timeline, cards and search use that copy and say so. To keep a file itself, choose Keep the original on this phone from a card's menu. Manage all of this in Settings → Kept on this iPhone, with Bring up to date now and Remove what's kept. Everything kept is removed when you sign out.

Notes. Notes are written on the phone first, so you can write and read them with no signal. They're sent to your account as you write, and wait on the phone until they can be.

Ask with "Caute" or "This iPhone"

In Search, choose Ask, then who answers:

  • Caute answers from your whole library, on Caute's servers.
  • This iPhone answers with the phone's own model, from the cards and notes kept on it. Every sentence cites one. Nothing leaves the phone, and these answers never go to your account, so they don't appear on your other devices.

Because nothing leaves the phone, an answer from This iPhone can include spaces you've kept away from AI. Such an answer isn't offered as a note.

With no connection, the phone answers when it can. Answering on the iPhone needs iOS 26 or later and Apple Intelligence turned on. Settings → Kept on this iPhone shows whether it's ready, how much is indexed, and has Rebuild the index.

Caute for Safari on iPhone

  1. Open the phone's Settings, then Apps, Safari, Extensions, Caute.
  2. Turn it on and allow it on all websites.
  3. In Safari, tap the page menu in the address bar and choose Caute.

It uses the app's sign-in, so there's nothing to sign in to. It catches a page as you see it, including pages you're signed in to. See The browser extension.

Caute for Mac

Caute for Mac lives in the menu bar, with no Dock icon. Click its icon to:

  • Catch thought (⌘↩): write a quick thought.
  • Catch clipboard (⇧⌘V): catch files, a picture, a link or words you copied.
  • Choose files… (⌘O): pick files to catch.

You can also drop files on the Caute icon in the menu bar. With no network, what you catch waits on the Mac and the panel says how many are waiting.

The Share menu. Caute appears in every app's Share menu on the Mac, in Finder, Preview, Mail, Notes, Safari and the rest, with the same sheet as on the iPhone.

Caute for Safari on the Mac. Choose Turn on Caute for Safari… from the menu bar panel, then turn it on in Safari. It uses the Mac app's sign-in, and it has the right-click menu and the ⌘⇧S shortcut as in Chrome.

Reading, searching and notes on the Mac happen in the web app: Open Caute in the panel takes you there.