Brain

Brain is a study workspace for university students. It keeps your notes, your calendar and your lecture PDFs in one place — and it stores your notes as ordinary Markdown files in your own Google Drive, so the work stays yours whether or not you keep using this app.

Free. No account to create beyond your Google one.

What Brain does

Notes you own

A block editor with headings, to-do lists, tables, callouts and code. Every page is saved as a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter in a folder in your Drive — readable in Obsidian, a text editor, or anything else.

Your calendar, both ways

Google Calendar events appear alongside your notes and can be created, moved and edited here. Changes sync back to Google, and changes made elsewhere appear here.

Lecture PDFs in context

Insert a PDF, image or video from Drive through Google's own file picker and read it inside the page. Only the files you pick are ever visible to Brain, and it cannot change them.

Linked, not filed

Link pages with wikilinks, see what points back at what, and view the whole set as a graph. Tag pages by subject to see a course cluster at a glance.

Works offline

Notes are stored on your device first and synced in the background, so a dropped connection in a basement lecture theatre costs you nothing.

Private by default

Your workspace is visible only to you. Nothing is shared, published, or used to train anything.

What Brain asks Google for, and why

Brain requests only the access it actually uses, and each permission maps to one feature above. You can review or revoke any of it at your Google account permissions at any time.

userinfo.email, userinfo.profile

To sign you in and show your name and picture. Nothing else.

drive.file

To create and update the Markdown files and attachments that make up your vault, and to read the individual files you hand it through Google's own file picker so they can be previewed in your notes. This is the narrowest Drive scope Google offers: Brain can see the files it created and the ones you explicitly chose, and nothing else in your Drive — enforced by Google, not by this app being careful.

calendar, calendar.events

To show your calendars and to create, move and edit events you change here, so your calendar stays correct on every device.

Brain does not sell data, does not show advertising, and does not use your content to train machine-learning models. Full detail is in the privacy policy.

Who made it

Brain is an independent project, built and run by one person for their own studies and shared with anyone who wants it. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a product of Google or any university. Contact: wwb.public@gmail.com.