Scratchd

Most notes apps want you to decide where a thought goes before you're allowed to write it down. Scratchd doesn't. Open it, type, done. Filing is something you can do later, or never. WRITE FIRST, DECIDE LATER Everything lands in one inbox. Archive it, pin it, tag it, turn it into a task, or leave it exactly where it fell. There are no folders to design before you can start. Today's scratchpad is always one tap away, already created, ready for the half-thought you'd otherwise lose. Fleeting notes let you set an expiry, seven days or thirty or ninety, and Scratchd brings them back for a quick keep-or-let-go review before anything disappears. The Stack is a pad of paper for the thought that needs somewhere to go before it goes anywhere. Swipe through the cards, and promote one into a real note if it turns out to be worth keeping. YOUR NOTES ARE FILES Not rows in a database only this app can read. Plain .md, .txt, .json, .yaml, .proto and textproto files sitting in a folder in your own iCloud Drive. Open them on your Mac. Edit them in another app. Back them up. Walk away from Scratchd entirely and take everything with you, because the folder is the format. There's no account to create and nothing to sign up for. Your iCloud, your files. CAPTURE FROM ANYWHERE • Share sheet, for a link, a screenshot or selected text • Home Screen widget for one-tap capture • Siri and Shortcuts • Apple Watch, including voice notes when your phone is not nearby • Drop a photo straight into a note or a journal entry VOICE THAT STAYS ON YOUR DEVICE Record a thought and turn it into notes without the audio leaving your iPhone. This needs Apple's on-device speech recognition for your language, which covers most iPhones running iOS 18. Scratchd checks before it records and tells you if yours cannot, rather than quietly sending your voice to a server. There is no server option, so if it cannot be done locally Scratchd does not do it. A JOURNAL THAT DOESN'T NAG Morning and evening prompts if you want them, a mood you can tap in a second, focus areas you actually chose, and back-dating for the day you meant to write and didn't. Skip a week and nothing scolds you. TASKS THAT FIT THE DAY Lists, sub-lists and checklists. A Today view, an Evening flag for the things that aren't morning problems, recurring tasks, and a logbook of what you finished. MORE FORMATS THAN YOU'D EXPECT Sticky boards for the ideas that want to sit next to each other. A drawing canvas with Apple Pencil. Rich previews for JSON, YAML, Protocol Buffers and textproto, with a schema viewer that jumps to definitions, plus Mermaid diagrams and API-request notes. If you work with config files, they're first-class here rather than grey text. BUILT NOT TO WATCH YOU No analytics. No tracking. No third-party SDKs collecting anything. Scratchd has no servers for your notes to sit on, because your notes stay in your iCloud. WHY IT STARTS AT VERSION 10 Scratchd was version 1 through 9 already, it just wasn't for sale. It started as a plain Markdown editor, and each version added the thing that was missing that year: the scratchpad, then tasks, then links, then the journal. The tenth is the first one worth charging for. Requires iOS 18. Also on the Mac App Store, where the listing is called Scratchd Desktop.