Mine As a journalist, I write. I write a lot. In fairness, I’ve wanted to be a writer my entire life, so it only makes sense that I do a lot of it. The problem with writing a lot, however, is that you inevitably need a dependable note taker to write a lot.
Over the years, they’ve come and gone.
It’s been Notepad and Text Editor, reliable classics that typically only work on the device you use them.
I tried OneNote back in the day, but it wasn’t for me, and a variety of editors designed to keep you focused by minimising the experience, but they hardly seemed built for proper editing.
It was Evernote, until it started to get expensive, and I questioned what I was paying for.
Then it was Simplenote, an Automattic app with note syncing that started to ask for payment and get equally buggy. That’s a problem for someone who writes a lot, because the notes become difficult to trust.
And finally, it became Standard Notes, a great little Simplenote replacement that was really good, but lacked what I really wanted: a way to speed up my work.
As a journalist, I needed a way to work more quickly as I wrote. I simply wanted to write and file.
Write a story, file it and move on. Write and file.
But to do that, I needed to log into my CMS of choice, copy the story after it was written, assign categories and tags, as well as an image, and then file. I had already made efforts to make the CMS itself faster, and to speed up how the page rendered, but I still needed to do things. Work in a separate window, prep the copy, and so on.
I had to write then file. I had managed to get faster, but only around my process. At the same time, Standard Notes started to get more difficult to deal with. Synchronising didn’t always work, the app wasn’t always friendly, and I started to wonder: what if I could make my own note taking app?
Stratus Notes is that. It’s a note taking app for journalists and writers who want to “write and file”, and use what they have available to them. They have a keyboard, a screen, and internet connection, and storage, whether they realise it or not.
On the iPhone, iPad, and with Macs, the storage can be the power of the Apple iCloud: you can use your files stored locally and in the cloud to synchronise your data. No need to use a database; you have a linked storage system.
Stratus uses that to sync data between devices, so if you’re writing an article on an iPhone and switch to an iPad, they’re linked and you can keep working.
And maybe you’ve needed to go back to the phone, but you need to file. Provided your settings are in place, you can also do that from Stratus notes easily.
Write and file. Write and file. Write and file.
The idea of Stratus is to make life a little easier for journalists and bloggers and anyone who loves to write. It’s that simple.
Even this article was published to this site using the app. I told you it was that simple.
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