One week ago, I released a new iOS application called Think Drop. The main features are simple. Drop your thoughts into an app without the need of sharing it to anybody. This includes other features like encryption, thread support, statistics, pinning and sharing to Twitter. But why did I build Think Drop in the first place as a side-project?
Unclutter the mind
Think Drop follows the same trend of building mobile applications that serve me. As someone that keeps thinking a lot all the time (not necessarily a good a thing), I wanted something where I can easily just drop my thoughts. A lot of people has suggested to me to write the thoughts down, so I did for years. Write them down to unclutter my mind. However, I never felt there was a good digital tool for this purpose.
While there are a lot of solutions like the default notes app on your mobile phones, it didn't feel natural to me. I feel like that most notes applications are designed for making long notes of courses, meetings, and summaries. Not designed for small and quick thoughts. Thus I wanted to build something that can solve this problem (at least for myself).
Private
When I started to build Think Drop, the main focus is that the thoughts are private. I don’t know if my notes when I write those down in Notion or Things are private and encrypted. This will be a bit riskier if I add my private and sensitive thoughts into those apps as well. Especially since those apps can’t be used offline without syncing with their cloud solutions. Thus I wanted to ensure that Think Drop is private and secure.
Some thoughts should always remain private. Thus all thoughts within Think Drop are only locally stored with AES-256 encryption. Also, if a thought is deleted, it will never be recoverable.
Drafting for social media
I finished my prototype and I used it for a couple of days. After a few days, I noticed that I wanted to share some written thoughts to other people. This led to an extra main feature which is social media sharing. Specifically for now Twitter. That is why Think Drop could also be used as a drafting tool for Twitter.
A lot of people throw their hot takes immediately on Twitter while not necessarily thinking about the thought or the articulation itself. Think Drop could be helping that since if you add the thought it is still private. With an extra step, you maybe think twice before posting a specific thought instead of deleting it later.
Searchable thoughts
So now we have a private app for thoughts and an option for social media sharing. What is missing? Oh yeah, making all the thoughts searchable. Of course, all other notes application support this, so I decided that Think Drop needs have it as well. Think Drop allows the search of past thoughts within Think Drop. If I wrote down a thought from a week ago and I want to reflect on it, then I can search for it.
These were the main reasons that I build Think Drop for. A simple application for writing and articulating thoughts privately and locally on your phone.
Thanks to feedback from the people that have used already, I implemented extra features like Face- and TouchID support to make the thoughts even more private and secure. There will be new features added as well in the future and I hope that you will give Think Drop a try as well!
Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter!
Happy writing!
