The Problem
Digging into some Tiago Forte Second Brain stuff recently. And for a while I was using Obsidian, its great, on desktop it runs brilliantly, the plugins and community are incredible, and the customisation is great!
However! I was using it with iCloud sync since that’s the free version and felt easiest and whilst this was fine for working on my ipad and mac, it was super sluggish on my phone.
Then once I got it to open there was often only 1 thing I wanted to do, add some quick thoughts to my daily note and then move on. But the UX was set up in a way in which that was a few taps away before I could actually get to taking notes.
The Vision
For those moments where I’m at the gym on a cycle machine and I just wanna write some notes this becomes too frustrating.
This lead me to think about a more specific version of a note taking app for your phone, one where it’s only for capturing thoughts and ideas.
No viewing of older notes or connecting other notes up, just capturing right there and now.
The Prototype
This led me to designing this prototype that attacks that specific goal. It’s smooth, it’s fast and the text box is right there.
In this idea you would be adding some text to your daily note in obsidian, this could cross over to any other app but let’s keep it focused on obsidian for now because it lacks that key capture experience where other apps like Apple Notes have perfected but it also has a huge amount of functionality for desktop users. This app is slotting in right there, not to replace anything out there or become a new app but slot in where the gaps from obsidian are.
The key feature here that steers away from the fast capture is the date picker. This was inspired by the gym use case I mentioned earlier but even more specifically inspired by my Sunday night gym sessions, when my mind is overflowing for stuff tomorrow and I just need to unload some stuff for tomorrow me. Then when I wake up in the morning it’s right there for me to tackle at the beginning of the day.
The Future
I don’t really have plans for this in the future. As far as I’m away this is a very difficult thing to pull off, Fleeting Notes seem to be close to getting it but in my eyes have missed the trick by becoming a full notes app in itself. And Tana Capture (I didn’t realise that I had stolen the name till the end of writing this I swear) seems to hit the mark pretty amazingly, it replace their mobile app completely with this idea of capture only on phone which is brilliant!
This project was a great exercise in solving those small granular friction points within my own life on the internet and I hope to do more of these because I can only assume that the friction points I’m running into are happening to a few other people using this tools.
