Now I’m starting see some Zettelkasten inspired apps, which lets you create threaded notes by chaining random ideas together. One of them is Gibberish, which packages this idea into a blogging app. The other one is Thinkdrop which is just a simple note app that can store ideas threaded together.
I also tried this Thinkdrop app for iPad but it is very minimal. But I like that that there are two apps available for this niche idea which let me write my ideas in threads.
I like Gibberish better though. It is a simple and elegant app.
The third app which is using this concept is Everlog which is more close to Day One. Everlog is a journal app, and works pretty well, but becomes pretty slow after a while when I’m typing my ideas into it. It is also more of a journal app, which is a natural place for these things. Also their Mac app is a less than optimal Catalyst app.
So we have Gibberish, Everlog, Thinkdrop for the iPad which can do threaded notes and journals. I like Everlog too, it is just buggy on the Mac. Although Gibberish too.
Each of these apps are good for different purposes. I mean I could use Gibberish for more draft-like blogging about stuff, since the end result is basically a blogpost.
My most weirdest feeling about writing a post like this is that why I would use a Zettelkasten when most of my posts are just random things that come out of my mind. I have a Zettelkasten, and I also wonder about things a lot, but the Zettelkasten way feels a bit too much work to keep a journal.
I just want to have a nice journal app, which can help me to drop my ideas into a canvas and make them available only. This is exactly what Gibberish does, my only problem is that I don’t need a blogging engine behind it. I just want to sync my posts between devices then let me copy the text or open it in Drafts and I’ll post it to places.
Okay, maybe having a blog behind these ideas is one of the ways to display a post which is not fully formed. But the app should have more ways to export the text. I could use shortcuts to grab the content and format it to a Markdown document, but it would also open yet another can of worms.
Another thing that can replicate this is basically using an outline to write. I mean the chat interface is just a small text box which lets me write in blocks. That’s what Craft does too. I could just use that do dumb ideas then export them to iA Writer to finish. I just don’t want to use Craft for this TBH. And the chat interface is pretty cool.
Actually Gibberish is a fancy way of writing Twitter threads. Which is a pretty nice thing to have by the way. So I’m actually thinking about using some form of Mastodon or Micro.blog way of doing this.
Although the best way to do this is still Gibberish.
Just a side note, seeing the same chat-like interface displayed as a post is actually not that bad. I write more or less like someone how doesn’t care about the stuff written in the previous bubbles, but it seems like flows almost like a post that I wrote in one go.
The goal should be that all posts are like one coherent thing.