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Coming soon for Mac and iOS
Your Thoughts, Connected
Our name is inspired by the dura mater, the hard layer of tissue that protects the human brain. Dura Notes is your brain’s defense against today’s tidal wave of AI-generated media. Designed to help you research, learn, make connections, think deeply, and write like a human.
Dura Notes is currently in development for Mac and iOS. Sign up below to join the waiting list.
Dura is a complete research-to-drafting pipeline. Your research and your writing, all in one place.
With Dura, you can import your research, save webpages for later, read ebooks and PDF’s – all in one beautiful place. No more switching between 4 different apps. Dura is multiple apps in one: Read-It-Later companion, Research Organizer, Idea Connector, and word processor. And the best part of all: no AI “helpers” to get in the way.
Dura Notes is a full featured notetaking and writing platform, for anything from taking a quick voice memo to writing a novel.
Write a simple note or a full-featured document, add images and tables, use code blocks and pull quotes, add a hand-drawn diagram, and much more.
With Dura’s signature Research & Write view, your research, notes, and canvas are right where you need them, all in one place.
Dura is built to enable human writing. Unlike our competitors, you’ll never see an AI assistant in Dura. You’ll never get a prompt asking you to “write” with AI. You won’t have to deal with AI “summarizing” your research or notes.
Export a timelapse of your writing process to show the human effort that built it. Add a “created with human intelligence” signature to anything you write. No AI slop allowed.
We’re sick of the way modern productivity apps take advantage of your data, your time, and your wallet. Dura is a tool to serve its users, not the other way around.
Dura’s development is guided by its core principles.
Check out our blog to see Dura develop in real time and see how we’re building your offline bubble of peace. Tips & tricks, examples of how we’re using Dura, and thoughts from Dave on the interconnected world of reading, writing, learning, and AI.
There’s no doubt that the digital world is becoming a more frictionless place every day. Or at least, it seems to be trying. There’s not a single manual action i can think of that doesn’t have some tech company trying to automate it into the oblivion of always-on convenience. I’ve always loved this old Kurt…
In short, Dura Notes is my attempt to make a tool designed to help humans read, learn, think, and write without the temptation of taking AI shortcuts. It’s an app designed to help you focus on human thinking. I can almost sympathize with people who think AI research is a good idea. We’re human, after…
Dura is your reading -> writing pipeline. We’ve curated a set of tools to help you accomplish every step in the research to writing process. Our import tools make it simple to save your sources, mark things to read later, or grab a quote to use in your latest piece. Our organization and workflow tools give you what you need, and only what you need, to manage your library of sources and in-flight projects. Our drafting and publication tools help you get your writing (your human writing) into the world as seamlessly as possible.
Think of Dura like this: one stop, no slop
It’s for you, obviously!
Dura was built with some users in mind, but we hope this will just be the tip of the iceberg. Here are a few, just for inspiration:
We can’t wait to see who else finds value in Dura!
Yeah, we know. There are a lot of cool and powerful things in the world, that doesn’t make it good for you to use them. Ever seen Lord of the Rings? Yeah, we rest our case.
Of course there are amazing applications of AI and all of its related subsets. But the reality is that they make us stupider when we use them to take shortcuts to avoid reading, thinking, writing, or any other important cognitive function. We don’t want people to be stupider.
But we’ve seen that many human thinking apps don’t actually make it easier to think. With other apps on the market, you have to use a browser, a notes app, a writing app, and a publishing app, all while keeping track of your own data (honestly, who could blame anyone for wanting help with all that?)
You can’t take a shortcut when it comes to reading or writing (not if you want to use your brain), but you can take shortcuts that make it easier to bring your reading and writing into one place – that’s Dura.
Find another app that’s adding AI tools to help you outsource your brain. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or… OK you get the point.
Dura isn’t an anti-Artificial-Intelligence tool. It’s a Pro-Human-Intelligence tool. Reading and writing are the basis for nearly all human knowledge, so if your goal is to be good at thinking (which is our goal), then outsourcing reading and writing to a bot is counterproductive.
Plus, AI is a massive topic that requires nuance, and there’s not enough space in this FAQ to provide all the nuance required to say anything intelligent about AI as a whole. We’ll work on that.
We don’t think AI should help humans communicate with other humans. But we don’t have a problem with using AI to help humans communicate with computers.
We’re a small dev team, and we use AI coding agents from time to time to help build and maintain Dura. But none of the words you see written here, in the app, or even in the documentation were written by an AI tool. (Yes, even the help pages). So when you find all the typos we’ve inevitably missed, just know that those mistakes are a sign of love from your devoted dev team.
Also, there are some features enabled by Machine Learning that many people might confuse with AI tools (ML and AI are related but different. Squares and Rectangles, sort of). We think many ML tools are perfectly fine, and some ML features are critical for users. Examples include accessibility features like read-aloud and voice-to-text, optical character recognition (we use this to help you search your pdf’s), and search functions.
If you ever have questions about Dura, it’s stance on AI, or anything else about the app, email us at info@duranotes.com
