I had no choice

I’m building Catchlight because I got tired of the apps I used every day. They looked fine and were okay to use, but they always felt like something was missing, the things I actually wanted.

I tried many solutions, but too many seemed to be made by developers, that’s not a slight at all, but the apps were function over form, or just too feature-rich to actually be used well. If you’ve tried a few, I suspect you’ll have had a similar experience.

The final straw was when the privacy protection a lot of us relied on quietly disappeared, thanks to regulation. I’d been looking for somewhere else to keep my notes and reminders, but, as I said, nothing quite worked for me.

Everything private enough was a chore to use. Everything pleasant to use wanted an account, a monthly subscription, and a copy of my data. That never felt like a fair trade. I’ve always tended towards privacy, not because I’ve something to hide, of course, but because I’ve grown to hate that my life and my data have become assets for ‘big tech’ (well, and ‘little tech’) to buy and sell like I’m a commodity.

So when I finally decided to resolve the issue for myself, the brief was simple, even if the build wasn’t, create something genuinely private, genuinely elegant and genuinely nice to use, in fact, it has to be almost invisible too.

If it takes more than a second or two to save a thought, I’ll stop using it, so capture had to be instant. My data had to remain mine, and only mine. I usually test for whether an app is worth trusting with this simple question, will it still work if the company behind it vanished tomorrow? The answer for most apps is, no. Catchlight will, I made sure of it.

Your Takes, my name for captured thoughts (notes, tasks and reminders feel too ordinary), are kept on your device, encrypted with a key only you hold, on your phone, wherever you take it. No servers to connect to, no account to create, just your thoughts, on your device, safeguarded by your key.