Hikari Scribe
The Hikari Scribe app icon: a warm sun on a deep indigo ground.

iPhone · iPad · Mac · Apple Watch

Notes, journaling and research sources in one place.

Keep a research diary, take reading notes or develop a manuscript while your ideas, your sources and your supporting files stay together.

Tell me when the beta opens See the app

Public TestFlight beta in preparation. No download link yet.

The app lets you pick the ground your workspace sits on. So does this page.

The iPad workspace: records in the sidebar, folder tabs, attachments and the day's entry.
The iPhone editor with a cover-draft note, an inline image marker and two attachments.

Captured from the running apps. Sample data throughout — the records, names and attachments belong to a seeded demo world.

01 · Writing

Write it the way you think it.

A formatted editor on every device, with the same toolbar in reach: headings, weight, lists, indent, quotes, and inline markers for the images and recordings you attached.

  • Shelves, folders and labels for subjects and projects
  • Image, audio, video and document attachments
  • Templates for the entries you write again and again
The iPad editor with the formatting toolbar open under the text.
The same toolbar on iPhone, above the keyboard, with an inline image marker in the text.

02 · Structure

Pick a paragraph up and put it where it belongs.

Press and hold a paragraph and it lifts off the page; drag it up or down and the rest of the text opens to let it land. The order of a draft becomes something you can think with, not something you retype.

Two separate captures of the same paragraphs — resting, then lifted — cross-fade as you scroll. Sample data.

The three paragraphs lying flat in the editor. The same three paragraphs with the first one lifted onto a floating card.

03 · Time

Find the day you were thinking about.

Entries are filed by day. A date scrubber runs down the edge of the list, the calendar marks the days that hold something, and entries strung on one thread appear on a shared timeline whatever folder they live in.

  • A date scrubber for the months you have written in
  • Threads and linked entries on one timeline
  • Optional Apple Calendar integration for alerts
The timeline of one chapter on iPhone: two versions of the same record, two weeks apart.
The day list with the date scrubber pulled out, held on 9 September.
The iPad calendar sheet, with dots under the days that hold entries.
The References sheet: the folder bibliography on the left, a literature search on the right.
The citation-style and export menus open: Vancouver, APA, IEEE, Harvard, RIS, BibTeX, CSV.

04 · References

Sources, where you write.

Search PubMed and OpenAlex without leaving the entry, add what you find to the folder's bibliography, and insert citations into the text. Numbered citations follow their order of appearance.

  • PubMed and OpenAlex search, or your own Zotero library
  • Import RIS and BibTeX
  • Export as Vancouver, APA, IEEE or Harvard text, or as RIS, BibTeX and CSV

Your own journal table, kept by year.

Journals is a reader for a table you import yourself: bring in a SCImago CSV, keep a set per year, and search it. Hikari shows what your file contains — SJR value, quartile, subject area, publisher — and connects to no external metrics service.

The Journals sheet on iPad: journal names with SJR values, quartile chips and publishers, and the year control.
The Mac journal-ranking row: how many journals are loaded for the selected year, and the CSV import button.

05 · Voice & Apple Watch

Say it now, read it later.

Record a voice note and turn it into text on the device itself, after a one-off Whisper model transfer whose progress you can watch. The Apple Watch app records on the wrist and hands the file to the paired iPhone.

  • Transcription runs on your device, not on a server
  • Recordings queue on the Watch and transfer when the phone is in range
The iPhone voice player: a waveform, the playhead, and the button that starts a transcription.
The Watch recorder at rest: 00:00 and a Tap to record button.
Ready
The Watch recorder running: RECORDING, 00:12, and a warm ring around the button.
Recording
The Watch list of recent recordings, each marked Queued.
Queued
The Watch handing a recording to the phone: SENDING, with a phone glyph inside the ring.
Sending

06 · And the rest

Everything you filed, findable again.

A quiet account of the work.

How many records, over how many active days, in which folder, under which label, with how many alerts still open. Counted from your own entries, on your own device, and shown without a leaderboard or a streak to break.

The iPad statistics sheet: a monthly bar chart, record counts, alerts, an activity grid and per-folder totals.

Labels, fields, search, alerts.

Label an entry, give it custom fields, set a date on which it should come back to you, and search across shelves. The alert count sits in the menu until you deal with it.

The Details pane on iPad with the alert date, the thread field and the label picker open.
Search results across shelves, each row showing its folder, date and label.

A window, not a phone screen stretched.

The Mac app is built for the larger workspace: a sidebar of records, folder tabs across the top, a settings window with its own sections, and a help book written in the Mac's own vocabulary.

The Mac workspace in the light appearance. The same Mac window in the dark appearance.
The Mac settings window on Templates, listing two saved entry outlines.

07 · Why this exists

Why I started building this.

I am a neurosurgeon and a researcher, and for a long time the hardest part of my own work was not the work itself. It was the material around it: the notes from a study or a clinical case, the sources, the citations, the images, the files that belong with them. Keeping all of that organised, filed and findable was a task that kept growing in front of me.

There are good applications for each of those jobs on its own. What I could not find was one that does all of them together — on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Watch — so that the same material stays organised, and stays readable in the order it happened, wherever I am working. That gap is why I started building Hikari months ago.

This beta is where that has arrived, and it runs on every Apple platform I work on. Please treat it as a beta: there will be bugs. What it needs now is people willing to help shape it, until it is something easy to reach and genuinely good to work in.

The plan is to release it without a subscription — as one package that covers the Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps together.

László HalászNeurosurgeon and researcher

We will tell you when the beta opens.

Send a line and you are on the list. Nothing else happens to your address.

feedback@hikariscribe.app

Public TestFlight beta in preparation. Requires iOS, iPadOS or macOS 26 or later. No separate Hikari account to create.