Hey everyone 👋🏼 We’re Sarah and Gerald, a husband-and-wife team, and we built [visualOS](https://visualos.app/).

As creatives, we’ve always used visual canvas tools to organize our thoughts, collect references and plan projects. Milanote is a fantastic tool, and we liked working with it, but we kept coming back to the same question: **why must our most personal and valuable work live on someone else’s servers?**

We wanted to arrange our *own* files on our *own* devices, work offline, and sync through a cloud folder we already controlled. Without an additional account or monthly subscription.

We also wanted **boards inside boards**, so a project could contain separate moodboards, research and planning spaces without everything ending up on one enormous canvas.

So we started building the tool we wanted for our own daily work.

**An infinite canvas connected to your own files**

In visualOS, you can freely arrange notes, images, PDFs, documents, links, to-do lists and drawings. Place a folder on the canvas, open it, and you’re inside another board.

When you connect a folder on your device:

* **Boards become real folders.**
* **Documents are saved as Markdown.**
* **Images and PDFs remain ordinary files.**
* **Sync happens through your own cloud folder**, such as iCloud Drive, Dropbox or Google Drive.

Your files stay accessible outside visualOS. No account to create, no uploading your boards to our servers, and you can work fully offline.

**We built it for ourselves. Then Reddit helped shape it.**

When we shared our little side project on Reddit for the first time, the response caught us off guard. People started using it for their own projects and telling us what was missing 😅

Those suggestions are now part of **v1.5**, our biggest update yet:

* **Automatic image arrangement and captions** for reference collections.
* **Color swatches and tables** directly on the canvas.
* **290+ folder icons** to distinguish projects and sub-boards.
* **Document and PDF preview cards**, with compact icons still available.
* **More fonts, support for your own fonts, and saved defaults** for notes and text.
* **Free-standing arrows, text inside shapes and quote cards.**

And much more...

**Who it’s for**

We see visualOS as a personal thinking space: somewhere to collect inspiration, work through ideas and keep the materials for a project together.

If you need real-time team collaboration or publicly shared, editable boards, Milanote or Miro will be a better fit. Our focus is on working with your own files, offline, without an ongoing subscription.

**Pricing**

* **Browser: free**, with no account, time limit, note cap or board cap. For direct folder access on desktop, use Chrome, Edge or Brave; Safari and Firefox don’t support that feature.
* **Apple app: one-time purchase, currently US$12.99 / €14.99**, covering iPhone, iPad and Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or newer). Buy once, use forever. No subscription or in-app purchases.

The iOS app shares the browser version’s core canvas and editing features, with native file access and adaptations for each platform.

👉 [**Explore visualOS and try it free**](https://visualos.app/)  
🍎 [**View the Apple app**](https://apps.apple.com/app/visualos-infinite-canvas/id6787359589)

We use visualOS every day ourselves, but hearing how other people work with it has been the most useful part of sharing it. You can leave feedback here or on our [public roadmap](https://visualos.featurebase.app/en/roadmap).

Thanks!  
Sarah & Gerald

visualOS — We always wanted a local-first alternative to Milanote that syncs through our own cloud. So we built it.