How I actually use it.

The last thing I saved was a link off X. It took 3 seconds, it's still sitting there untouched, and Sunday can deal with it.

The last thing I saved was a link. Somebody on X had posted a site I thought was worth a longer look, so I hit share, picked Catchlight, and went back to scrolling. Three seconds, probably less.

It's still sitting there. I haven't been back to it once.

Before I built this, that link would have gone into bookmarks, or a read-later app, or a tab I'd never close. I used to hoard those. The nice thing about having one place is that I don't have to decide which system it belongs to, I just put it where everything else goes.

It gets a look on Sunday along with everything else that landed in the week, and if I can't say what it changes by then, it goes. That's the whole of my system, and none of it happened at the moment I hit share.

The dubious thread

I went back through my old Apple Notes a while ago, and what struck me wasn't the volume. It was the shape.

Almost nothing in there was longer than a sentence or two. A thought, a link, something I needed to remember on Tuesday. That's what my notes actually are, and I suspect that's what most people's are, whatever the app's marketing suggests we're all doing with them.

But they weren't stored that way. There'd be 10 of them sitting on a single page, written weeks apart, held together by some dubious thread that presumably made sense to me the day I started it. Open the page, you get all ten. Want one, you read the lot, and the thread wasn't really a thread at all, looking at it now, it was just the page I happened to have open.

That's the bit I think notes apps get wrong. You can have the best search in the world and it won't help you, because the thing you're looking for isn't a page, it's a sentence that's been buried inside one for 8 months. Notes are only useful if it's easy to find them, read them and do something about them. A page holding 10 unrelated thoughts fails all three, quietly, while looking perfectly organised.

A Take is one thing.

What's actually in mine

Links, mostly. Quick thoughts. Reminders for things I'd otherwise forget, which is most things.

Nothing long. I'm not writing a book on a phone and I've never understood the apps that seem to expect it. I have a thought, I save it in seconds, I carry on with my day. If I want to write something properly I'll sit down at a desk like a normal person.

The bit I didn't expect to rely on

Because I'm still testing, I wipe the app and put everything back several times a week. Export, start over, import. I've done it dozens of times now and I've never lost a note.

Writing this caught one, as it happens. A Take marked Important was coming back unmarked, and a manual arrangement was being lost, because the export sorts by when each Take was made and the position wasn't travelling with it. Both are fixed now. The words, the timestamps, the reminders, whether something was an Obie, the flags and the order all survive.

It's one markdown file, and it takes seconds. I have 3 or 4 of them sitting in a folder right now.

I didn't build export as a feature, not really, I built it because an app that holds your only copy and won't give it back is a hostage situation no one should fear. It's turned into the thing I use most, and it's the reason I'm relaxed about testing on my own real data.

Nothing here destroys anything

No setting in the app changes what a Take says. You can change how it's sorted, newest first, oldest first, or drag them where you like. You can change how much of each one you see before it truncates. None of that touches the words, so switching back puts everything exactly where it was.

There's one exception. You can turn on auto-delete for completed tasks. It's off unless you switch it on, it only takes things you've ticked off, and it never touches a note. Every other option in there is about how your Takes look to you, not what they are.

The confirmation before deleting is on by default, and a delete in Catchlight is a real delete, there's no bin to fish it back out of and no undo, so the confirmation is the only thing standing between you and a lost Take. I'd rather that got in your way occasionally than not.

What I want to change

The thing I most want to change is how it looks.

I've been living inside this for months. You see the same screen all day, every day, and you get bored of it. You just do. It's what happens to anything you look at for long enough, and I'd rather say so than pretend I'm still delighted by my own colour choices.

I'm looking forward to Scenes, which is my way of making it look how I want it to look on a given day. The scaffold for it is already built. It isn't needed for anything to work, which is exactly why it hasn't shipped yet, and one day it will.

That link off X is still sitting there, incidentally. I'll find out on Sunday whether I wanted it or just liked the look of it.