newsonaut

Turning inner space into outer space

October 11, 2020

A handy app for jotting your ideas

Now that I’m writing something every day (fingers crossed), I need a stream of ideas to keep me going. The ideas arrive, but they sometimes exit too soon for me to remember them. The answer: notes.

Often the advice is to carry a notebook where you can jot down your ideas. I already have two of my pockets stuffed with a wallet and a phone. If anything, I would like to find a way of cutting down. That might happen if I ever build up confidence in the iPhone’s wallet app.

So the solution for now is a simple scratchpad app. There are plenty of notes apps filled with a flood of features. In fact I’ve got one that gives me warm fuzzies — Bear. But this is not the same as a scratchpad.

I downloaded Quick Draft a couple of days ago, and so far it’s working well. It has one page, and one page only. Whatever you type on that page is what you see every time you launch it.

It supports markdown, so you can do a bit of styling for headings, bold and italic. You can share, select all, copy all, create checkboxes for a to-do list, and switch fonts.

If you get the Mac version, it automatically syncs your notes via iCloud. I didn’t have to do a thing to make this work.

There is a pro version that allows for more customization, but what you get for free is more than enough for my needs.

By writing this post, I’ve checked the second item in my Quick Draft list. I checked the first one yesterday with my post on favourite crossword clues. There are a couple left, which doesn’t seem like enough — yikes!