Context capture

What MemNote records alongside a note — place, time, and device — and how that lets you recall by association.

This is the part of MemNote that is not like other note apps. When you create a note, MemNote quietly records the circumstances you created it in, so that later you can find it by remembering the moment instead of the words.

What gets captured

Where you were — your coordinates, and a place name resolved from them.
When — the note’s created and updated times.
Which device — its name and platform, so a note written on your phone looks different in the list from one written on your desktop.

Capture happens once, when the note is first created. Editing a note later does not move it to wherever you happen to be sitting now — the note keeps the place it was born in. The updated time does change with every edit.

Location arrives asynchronously, so a brand-new note may show up in the list a second or two before its place name does.

Location permission

The first time MemNote captures context, your operating system asks for location permission. That prompt comes from creating your first note, not from launching the app.

Everything is best-effort. If you decline, or location services are off, or a fix simply is not available, the note is created anyway — it just has no coordinates, and it will not appear on the map.

There is no in-app switch that turns capture off. The location permission you grant your operating system is the control.

Place names

Coordinates on their own are not memorable, so MemNote resolves them into a place name. It keeps the pieces separately — street number, street, neighbourhood, city, county, state or region, country, postal code — which is why you can choose how much of it to show.

Settings → Location Format picks the display style:

Option	Shows
Full Address	Street number and street, city, region
City & State	City and region — the default
State & Country	Region and country
Hide Location	Nothing

Hide Location only hides it. Coordinates are still captured, still synced, and still included in a markdown export. If a place name could not be resolved, MemNote falls back to showing the raw coordinates; if there is no location at all, a note reads Unknown Location.

Where you see it

There is no separate “details” panel — context is shown inline, wherever a note is:

Full note cards in the list, and the detail pane in Trash, carry a footer: a pin and the place on the left, then the device name and a time on the right. The time follows your sort order — the updated time when you are sorting by Date Updated, otherwise the created time. Recent times read as 5m ago or 3h ago; older ones as a date.
Compact cards show a single line under the title: tags, a short place name, the device’s platform icon, and the date. On the timeline and on map markers the place is left off, since those views already tell you when and where.

Recall by association

Captured context is what the other views are built on: