Memos

I’ve tried to make this website timeless. I purposefully decided to avoid skeuomorphism (or liquid glass, neumorphism, etc.) and modern design trends that may quickly become outdated. I am mostly inspired by classic Swiss design of the 20th century, Metro by Microsoft (which is largely inspired by airport navigation), Vitsœ, and the New York City Subway.

I figured what works best is creating a sense of order and clarity with grids and typography, then adding some details that are not perfectly aligned to make everything feel more human and less sterile. This completes the overall aesthetic I’m aiming for.

Even after 15 years since the iPad’s release, most note-taking apps are still skeuomorphic. I mean it in the fundamental sense: they use the paper metaphor — pages, ink, eraser, and highlighter. This worked to make people believe that it could replace their notebook. But with more time, it becomes more and more pointless. In fact, this hurts the experience significantly and limits the possibilities.

It’s like if cars were designed to look exactly like horses and carriages instead of being built for speed and efficiency.

For instance, why do we have issues like ‘I started writing a word but realized there’s not enough space’? This problem is inherited from paper and has no reason to exist. Formatting writing between pages also causes problems. Even though highlighting definitions doesn’t correlate with memory retention and is proven to be purely for structuring, we still do it as if writing on paper.

What if you escaped from the paper legacy in note-taking and tried to build the experience from scratch? Just like a typewriter supercharged the handwriting experience, or a computer supercharged the typewriter.

Speaking of new perspectives, most users of note-taking apps are students. They use the app as a utility to preserve, decompose, and structure information for the purpose of learning. For some reason, the apps that are marketed as educational tools are still mostly designed to be the best recording tool, not a general-purpose learning tool, which is how they are actually used.

Some complementary factors are:

• Since 2022, students use AI as one of the core tools for learning
• They provide context to the AI — essentially, the same context they write down in their notes
• AI models become more and more capable and efficient every year and can be run on a tablet
• Modern tablets have insane compute power, which is mostly idle during note-taking

What if you built a note-taking app that is not just a recording tool, but a learning tool? Then the primary focus becomes the retention of information, the engagement, and the evaluation of progress. I don’t mean simply adding a chat sidebar, but rather building the app around the new technology and the new use case.

Went to a Raycast meetup at the amo office in Paris. Well, ‘office’ is an overstatement.