As a journalist, I write. I write a lot. In fairness, I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life, so it only makes sense that I do a lot of it.
The problem with writing a lot, however, is that you inevitably need a dependable note taker to write a lot.
Over the years, they’ve come and gone.
It’s been Notepad and Text Editor, reliable classics that typically only work on the device you use them. I tried OneNote back in the day, but it wasn’t for me, and a variety of editors designed to keep you focused by minimising the experience, but they hardly seemed built for proper editing.
It was Evernote, until it started to get expensive, and I questioned what I was paying for.
Then it was Simplenote, an Automattic app with note syncing that started to ask for payment and get equally buggy. That’s a problem for someone who writes a lot, because the notes become difficult to trust.
And finally, it became Standard Notes, a great little Simplenote replacement that was really good, but lacked what I really wanted: a way to speed up my work.
As a journalist, I needed a way to work more quickly as I wrote. I simply wanted to write and file.
Write a story, file it and move on. Write and file.
But to do that, I needed to log into my CMS of choice, copy the story after it was written, assign categories and tags, as well as an image, and then file. I had already made efforts to make the CMS itself faster, and to speed up how the page rendered, but I still needed to do things. Work in a separate window, prep the copy, and so on.
I had to write then