I have lots of ideas, but I have the memory of a doorknob.

Since middleschool, I’ve carried around really small notebooks to help me remember things: phone numbers, addresses, TODOs, random ideas.

I wrote the Field Notes Brand website, and even started a company with Laurel Hechanova that sold subscriptions to paper notebooks.

So, as a software engineer that is on a computer or phone a lot, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find a note taking app that feels like paper and pen.

The Apple Notes app is too complicated. Messages I send to myself on Slack or iMessage get mixed up with important communications. The reminders app gets cluttered and I stop using it, missing important reminders. Markdown files with a good editor works, but I feel like such an idiot creating a file with only a fragment of a sentence, and get overwhelmed trying to figure out how to organize the files so I can find them in the future.

Then, earlier this year, when I was working on a different app with Laurel, frustrated that all the ideas I was having throughout the day had no place to go, I built an insanely simple app that really only allows appending text to one super long, running document. I never published it to the app store, but then a friend said at random that he wanted a really simple notes app, and described, almost exactly, the app that I had already built.

And so, I’m thrilled to announce Appended, a stupid simple note app.

You can add text, and, if you want to, scratch it out. (If you really want to, you can delete them too.) There’s robust search, integration with Siri, and it syncs across your devices (iCloud required, Mac app coming soon). No complicated tagging, just add “#tag” to your text and search for it later. No complicated UI for grouping, say, notes with links, just search for “http”. No complicated organization, just one long, ongoing, fast-to-load stream of thoughts, sorted by the time you wrote it. No pressure to fix your old typos, or correct your past self, because there’s no ability to edit.

Appended is awaiting App Store review, but I’ll be sure to update this when it’s approved!