What (apps) do you use to stash away your ideas?

[sshakeel]

Imagine getting an idea in the middle of a night. What do you use to capture it so you can come back to it? Is it a diary? Or a piece of napkin? Or an app?

I have been working on an app that basically captures your ideas. Not only that, it also aims to capture the circumstances that inspired the idea. e.g. time of the day, day of the week, your current location. It displays stats based on these variables and simply tells you in what circumstances you are coming up with ideas. What do you guys think about something like this?

If there is interest, I can post a link and show you guys what I have so far.

[akadanpaul]

I just started using Sticky.io to jot down all my thoughts. I also used evernote in the past but I did not like the search functionality and or the app. If I was on the go and had an idea I would have to open the app, open the folder "Ideas" and then write down my thoughts there.

With Sticky it is 100x easier/faster, you can send in notes via SMS, gchat, or web browser. I personally like the sms feature, it makes taking notes on the go so easy. Also it allows you to organize notes on the fly. For example you can write this note:

@ideas create the next facebook. #todo

Now I have a new note in my ideas folder and it is tagged with "todo". I have only been using it for a few weeks but I love it so far. Hope this helps!

[sshakeel]

Interesting, I love the idea of sending your notes through SMS. No need to sign in or even have a working internet connection. I am thinking the app authenticates you using the phone number on your profile. Brilliant concept!

[sshakeel]

Since there is some interest, here is what I have so far: http://ideatagr.com

Please remember that it is still in very early stages. I am at a point where I am getting people to test the concept and the practicality of this app.

There is a system in app to report bugs and gather feedback. Since I created this from scratch and am the only one working on it, it takes me a bit to implement bug fixes but I do get to them eventually.

Feel free to sign up and give me your feedback. Thank you!

[krapp]

I keep getting 'geolocation is not supported by this browser' js prompts every time the page loads, which is _extremely_ annoying.

[sshakeel]

Was that on the homepage? What browser are you using?

[krapp]

It's popping up on all of the pages. I'm using firefox 16.0.2 http://i.imgur.com/xODBn.jpg

[sshakeel]

Weird. My Firefox 16.0.1 has no issues. I had to allow location access though. I am looking in to it.

[krapp]

Oops, it looks like I turned it off in firefox at some point and probably forgot the geolocation option even existed after that, so I guess that clears that up.

The prompt is really too obstructive though.

[Devlin_Donnelly]

I usually write down on whatever is handy, be it a scrap of paper, a text editor on my desktop machine, or the Notes app on my iPad.

The result of this is that all of my notes are on different machines, in different folders or formats.

Now that you mention it, it might be nice to have an app in the cloud that would be just for this purpose and would sync data across all of my devices.

[sshakeel]

Exactly, your ideas are all over the place and you end up losing them! That was my entire motivation behind working on something like this.

[krapp]

I usually just open a text editor and dump my thoughts into it.

If you can integrate, maybe, a canvas image editor and a text editor then you'd have something at least a bit more useful than Notepad++ for me in that regard. Being able to easily export and import will be nice too.

[sshakeel]

What I am aiming for is to capture your thoughts very quickly at first. I know you mean to exapand on those thoughts, drawing up a sketch etc but that would be the second or third step after you capture your idea.

The problem I am trying to solve is that it is very easy to lose our ideas in all our notes. Most of the time, our ideas sit somewhere in a folder and we forget about them. By capturing stats about how and when you generate your ideas, I am looking to (hopefully) trigger some motivation and enhance creativity by reproducing the circumstances that generated your previous ideas in the first place. I hope it makes sense...

[jtoeman]

i use evernote. i have a notebook called "ideas" and basically i use the evernote email address plus "@-tag" to make it work. example:

Subject: Solution to perpetual motion problem = cats + bacon @Ideas

Subject: Write the classic boy-meets-fish bromance movie @Ideas

Subject: Create a social networking site dedicated to the best herpderp photos @Ideas

etc.

[sshakeel]

Yeah, a lot of people, including myself, use evernote or some sort of note taking app. But I felt that my ideas were being lost under a pile of notes.

It's nice to quickly jot down your idea but I wanted to analyze my behaviour and perhaps figure out what it is that inspiring me to come up with those ideas. Is it the coffee rush in the morning or the calmness of the night that turns that part of my brain on which enables me to start popping out ideas.

[sshakeel]

Also, funny that you mention tags. The app I am working on also revolves around the concept of tagging to categorize and organize your ideas.