Whenever I need to make quick notes during a meeting, or paste some url / code / whatever to hold it, or paste formatted text to un-format it, I used to open TextEdit.

It's the equivalent of taking a scrap piece of paper and jotting something down.

These kinds of notes I don't want in any cloud, serious note-taking app or any code editor.

But the burden of having 1 extra click on open (new document), and deciding what to do with old notes when closing (delete? save?) was too much.

So I built my own notepad which behaves like a super simple textedit, but all notes are automatically saved to a predefined folder.

- Opens with a new note when launched, or re-opened.

- Notes can be auto-named by timestamp, numbered "Note N", custom prefix or by first line of text.

- Hideable sidebar shows all notes.

- Shortcuts can create, delete, switch between notes.

Bonus points for pointing claude code to that folder to organize or work with all notes.

Again: This is a custom app I made for myself, so probably it's not useful to anyone, but anyhow:

https://tomreinert.de/en/verygoodnotepad/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/very-good-notepad/id6758906859

PS: This was built with the new Claude Code integration in xcode 26.3, worked quite well.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022138

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

As someone with 0 (zero) swift skills and who has built a very well functioning iOS app purely with AI, I disagree.

AI made me infinitly faster because without it I wouldn‘t even have tried to build it.

And yes, I know the limits and security concerns and understand enough to be effective with AI.

You can build functioning applications just fine.

It‘s complexity and novel problems where AI _might_ struggle, but not every software is complex or novel.

You will learn SO MUCH!

Well, I could not maintain the app in the long run and it faded.

Every 3-5 days I thought about how to resurrect it myself. I started Swift tutorials, gave up, started again, gave up again. Just couldn't do it. But also couldn't shake it.

Today, I'm reading every discussion about the pros and cons of vibe coding. I watch the hype and am somewhat going through the AI disillusionment phase myself.

But then, AI coding now enabled me to actually rebuild the app exactly as I imagined it in a whole new design, but with the same minimalistic principles. This use of AI is still a wonder to me.

I honestly built this for myself, like a bespoke app for my guitar practice.

There are some good apps out there, but they weren't exactly as I needed. I'm sure some of you know this particular form of suffering where an app is perfectly fine for everyone else but you notice every tiny thing that could be better. Classic designer/developer curse.

Most importantly I wanted an app that has: - no ads, no popups or nags - no signup or trials - just works almost like a hardware tool that sits there and plays when you press the button

Happy to share it now for free with everybody who might find it useful. I went for an optional in-app purchase to a.) find out how that works and learn, and b.) maybe earn money, come on let me dream.

Bonus experiment: There's an ad- and tracking-free web version I'm thinking could be a nice gateway to the iOS app: https://www.verygoodmetronome.com

Landing Page: https://www.verygoodmetronome.com/app/

And the app itself: https://apple.co/3WllSby

Any feedback or thoughts are welcome!

My first HN post and I'm not even a hacker... please be kind?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45450565

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

A minor note: Nowhere in the release note do you say what the app is or what it does. Sure, I can find out by following the links, but coming in cold not knowing what immich is, I was kind of expecting to learn that in the write-up.

Also, choosing an input method felt tricky. I hadn’t used the product yet, so I didn’t really know what to pick or what would work best for me.

Once I got into the app, everything made sense, but it wasn’t clear upfront.

Maybe you could let people start with a default setup and explore the options while using it. That way, the learning happens more naturally and the config step doesn’t feel like a blocker.