Your Ideas Deserve Better Than Apple Notes

I have about 140 ideas in idea.log right now. Before I built it, those ideas lived in Apple Notes. Or they didn’t live anywhere, which was more often the problem.

The Notes app is fine for grocery lists and meeting notes. But ideas are different. An idea needs a next step. It needs a status. It needs to be findable six weeks later when you suddenly have a free Saturday afternoon and want to build something.

Here’s what I kept running into with Notes:

Ideas disappeared into the pile. I’d capture something, and it would sink below grocery lists, meeting notes, and random links I saved. Gone. The whole point of capturing an idea is being able to find it later, and Notes makes that genuinely hard once you have more than a dozen.

No concept of progress. An idea in Notes is either there or deleted. There’s no way to track whether you’ve started on it, defined a first step, finished it, or decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. I had ideas sitting in Notes for months with no way to tell which ones I’d already explored.

No way to act on them. This is the big one. Capturing an idea is step one. Step two is doing something about it. Notes gives you a text blob. That’s it.

I wanted something that would:

1. Stay out of my way during capture (especially voice capture while biking)
2. Help me define what to do first
3. Track whether I actually followed through
4. Make it easy to hand an idea off to an AI tool when I’m ready to build

So I built idea.log.

◊ The capture screen: just the idea, an optional first step, and tags.

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The first step field was the feature that changed my behavior. There’s research showing that defining a concrete next action dramatically increases the likelihood of actually doing something. Every idea in idea.log can have a first step, and if you’re stuck, you can tap [suggest] to get one generated for you.

◊ The detail view with comments, status tracking, and the share menu.

The other feature I didn’t expect to use so much is Share with Agent. When I’m ready to actually work on an idea, I tap share, choose “Share with Agent,” and I get a structured prompt with the idea, its status, any notes I’ve added, and a tailored request I can paste directly into Claude. The prompt adapts based on whether the idea is pending, in progress, or abandoned.

◊ Stats tracking idea capture rate, first step completion, and trends over time.

It sounds like a small thing, but it means my ideas actually have somewhere to go. They’re not sitting in a note. They have a first step, a status, and a bridge to the tools I use to build things.

idea.log is $1.99 on the App Store. One-time purchase, no subscription. No account, no sync, no tracking. Everything stays on your device.