Pin a note to one page and it appears only on that tab. Switch tabs and it hides. Reopen the page, even on your other Mac, and it comes back where it belongs. Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Arc, Brave and Edge, with no extension in any of them.
A note about "the thing to fix on this dashboard" floats on the desktop, detached from the page it's actually about. Switch to another tab and it's just noise — a reminder with no idea which page it belongs to. The page and the note that goes with it are never tied together, so the note is in your way everywhere except where you need it.
A note sticks to the page's URL, so it shows only when that page is open. Switch to another tab and it quietly hides; come back and it's there again. The note lives with the page it's about — not on your desktop in front of everything else.
Closed the tab? Open TackBoard and click Reveal — TackNote reopens the exact URL and the note returns with it. The note is the shortcut back to the page it belongs to.
The same web note can appear on your other Mac, synced through your own iCloud and encrypted, and even in another browser, matched by the page URL. One note, the right page, wherever you're working.
Browsers are a Full-tier integration — TackNote matches a note to the page by its normalized URL, shows it only on that tab, and brings it back when you reopen the page. If a synced note's browser isn't installed on a given Mac, TackNote offers to open it in that Mac's default browser instead.
A note binds to the page's normalized URL, so it appears only when that page is the active tab and hides everywhere else.
Click Reveal on a web note and TackNote reopens the exact URL it belongs to — the note returns with the page, even after you closed the tab.
Web-page notes sync through your own iCloud, encrypted, and reappear on the matching page on your other Mac.
Matched by URL, the same note can show in another browser. If that browser isn't installed on a Mac, TackNote offers to open it in the default one.
Browsers do not all expose the current page the same way, so TackNote does not treat them the same way. There is no extension in any of them. Nothing is installed inside the browser at all. What differs is how the address of the front tab is read.
TackNote asks Safari for the address of the front document through AppleScript. macOS requests a one-time Automation permission the first time, and nothing after that. Safari Technology Preview works the same way.
These are all Chromium browsers, so TackNote asks for the address of the active tab in the front window, again through AppleScript with a one-time Automation permission. Chrome Canary, Chromium and Dia use the same path.
Firefox does not offer the current URL over AppleScript at all. Rather than skip it, TackNote reads the address bar through the macOS Accessibility API instead. It is a different route to the same answer, and Firefox Developer Edition is handled the same way.
Two details worth knowing, because they are the difference between this working and being annoying. When a single page app blanks its own address bar, which Outlook on the web does, TackNote recovers the real page address from the page itself rather than giving up. And only ordinary web and local file addresses are ever accepted. Every other kind of address is refused, so an internal browser page is never captured into a note.
Checking which tab you are on is the kind of thing that gets expensive if you do it naively, once per note, forever. TackNote reads the front tab once per browser and shares that answer with every note stuck to it, holding it for a fraction of a second so a burst of notes cannot turn into a burst of requests. A read that takes too long is abandoned rather than allowed to block, so a browser busy mid page load never stalls the app. This is why a wall of tacked notes does not cost you a fan.
"I reopen the dashboard tab and the note is already there — waiting on the exact page — on whichever Mac I sit down at."
Yes, by the page's URL. A note shows only while that page is the active tab and hides on every other tab.
Yes. Web-page notes sync through your own iCloud, encrypted, so the note returns on the matching page on your other Mac.
The same note can appear by matching the page URL. If the original browser isn't installed there, TackNote offers to open it in your default browser.
No extension, in any browser. TackNote is a separate menu-bar app that reads the front tab's address and nothing else, and one read is shared by every note stuck to that browser.
Yes — a 7-day free trial, no credit card required. After that, a one-time $24.99 license unlocks TackNote on up to 3 computers.
7-day free trial · No card required · Direct download · No App Store
Every note is sealed with AES-256 encryption the moment you write it — the key lives in your Mac’s Keychain, never on a server. Switch on iCloud sync and your notes are encrypted on your Mac before they travel through your own iCloud. Apple holds the keys to that sync unless you turn on Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which makes it end-to-end encrypted and readable only on your devices. No accounts, no trackers, no servers we control. Not even we can read your notes.