oldany

Small update: DropMind just showed up in today’s selfh.st newsletter under development activity.

Feels like the idea is slowly starting to resonate — curious to see how people end up using it in their own setups.

That’s a really good way to frame it.

I kept coming back to the idea that the “act” shouldn’t be something new you have to learn — it should reuse what you’re already doing in each context.

So instead of one single physical gesture, it’s more like a single intent expressed through different native actions:

• on mobile → share
• on desktop → paste
• in browser → bookmarklet
• sometimes even just typing something and sending it

The key (for me) wasn’t forcing one gesture, but making all of those feel like the same action underneath.

So the mental model becomes: “this goes into my inbox”, regardless of how I triggered it.

That’s where things started to click for me.

Yeah exactly — that’s pretty much the pattern I kept falling into too.

“Texting myself” works, but it still feels like you're bending a tool to do something it wasn’t really designed for.

What I was trying to fix was that exact moment before that — when something appears and you either capture it instantly… or lose it.

So instead of choosing the tool each time, I tried to make the entry point always the same, and push the “what is this?” decision later.

Curious if that resonates with how you use it day-to-day.

Yeah I used the “message to self” approach for a while too — it works surprisingly well 🙂

What I ended up building is basically a very minimal “capture layer”, where no matter the context (share, paste, shortcut, etc.), everything goes into the same place instantly, without deciding upfront what it is or where it belongs.

It’s not really a note-taking tool — more like a universal entry point.

If you're curious: https://github.com/oldany/dropmind

Good question 🙂

For me it’s mostly the small, in-the-moment things:

• a link I want to check later
• a quick thought or idea
• a snippet of text or code
• something I see on my phone that I don’t want to lose
• sometimes even just a reminder or “I should look into this”

Not really structured notes — more like “things that appear during the day” that I don’t want to think about organizing right away.

That’s also why tools like Joplin or OneNote never quite fit for me in that specific moment — they work great once you sit down to write something, but not as much as a quick, frictionless entry point.

Yeah that makes sense — treating a folder as the universal entry point is a clever way to unify things.

I think that’s exactly the direction: trying to reduce everything to a single “drop zone”.

Where I personally kept feeling friction is that you still need something in between to get things into that folder (scripts, gestures, automations, etc.).

So the entry point becomes “save to this folder”, but the way you get there still depends on context.

That’s the part I always found hard to make truly uniform.

That’s actually a really interesting direction — using screenshots as a universal entry point.

It kind of shows how strong the need is for a single capture flow, even if it means bending everything into one format.

What always stopped me there is exactly what you mentioned — once you need OCR, scripts, post-processing… it starts adding friction again.

I kept wondering if the entry point could stay just as universal, but without needing to transform the content first.

That’s actually a really solid setup.

What always got me personally is exactly that — over time I’d end up with multiple “entry points” depending on context (screenshot, chat, browser, notes…).

Each one works, but I’d still need to mentally switch between them depending on what I’m capturing.

I kept wishing for something where the entry point is always the same, no matter the context.

Yeah Syncthing solves the “where does the data live” part really well.

What I kept struggling with is the step before that — actually capturing something in the moment, from whatever context you're in.

Even with sync in place, I always felt like I still had to decide where to put things and which tool to use.

That’s where it starts to break down for me.

Yeah I get what you mean 🙂

Shortcuts work (that’s what I’m using on iOS right now), but they can feel a bit “indirect” compared to something more native like share sheets or drag & drop.

Curious to hear how it feels once you try it — especially what feels frictionless vs what doesn’t.

Yeah I tried going the “second brain” route too (Trilium, Obsidian, etc.)

What I kept running into is that they’re great once something is already in the system — but capturing still feels like a separate step where you have to think about where it belongs.

I started wondering if capturing should be completely independent from organization, and almost “context-free”.

More like a thin layer you can hit instantly from anywhere, without deciding anything upfront.

Yeah I used that too for a while — it works surprisingly well, but I always felt it’s more of a workaround than something designed for capturing.