John Gruber, in his Daring Fireball post responding to an article of the same name by Kyle Chayka at The New Yorker:

Saving a whole pile of notes to yourself as text files on your desktop, with no organization into sub-folders, isn’t wrong. The whole point of “just put it on the desktop” is to absolve yourself of thinking about where to file something properly. That’s friction, and if you face a bit of friction every time you want to jot something down, it increases the likelihood that you won’t jot it down because you didn’t want to deal with the friction.

This exact scenario is what led me—22 years ago, in 2004!—to create xPad for macOS.

I had been hired by a web design agency with a list of existing client projects, all of which were in some state of disrepair, and it was my job, day-in and day-out, to dig into ancient codebases and fix critical bugs as quickly as possible. These were the days before large-scale use of version management systems like Git, so I had to be extremely careful to keep many nippets of code and notes as I tore apart pages and services. And, at the end of each day, I would end up with 50 text files in TextEdit that I needed to save manually. The next day, I’d have to open them all up again.

I realized quickly in 2004 what I needed was a simple way to have a single UI that would allow me to create and edit text documents, but which completely removed the friction of saving, opening, categorizing and labeling. I solved this problem by building my first native app, xPad.

xPad would automatically store and retrieve all your documents for you, and had simple support for visual categorization (which you could completely ignore if you so desired)¹ . The best part was that it was very fast and had no cognitive overhead—it was just was the place all of your text went. While it didn’t make much money in the beginning, after I made it freeware it ended up being quite popular because I wasn’t the only person who needed a tool like that.

Chayka, in his article, wrote:

I’ve tried out other software for keeping track of my random thoughts and ideas in progress—the personal note-storage app Evernote; the task-management board Trello; the collaborative digital workspace Notion, which can store and share company information. Each encourages you to adapt to a certain philosophy of organization, with its own formats and filing systems. But nothing has served me better than the brute simplicity of TextEdit, which doesn’t try to help you at all with the process of thinking. Using the app is the closest you can get to writing longhand on a screen.

Part of my goal with xPad (and, later, the iOS app we created at Karbon called Scratch² ), was that it didn’t force you to adopt any philosophy, format or filing system. It was simply a fast way to create text, with zero managerial duties for saving, retrieving or managing files.

Modern Apple OSes have adopted the same basic strategy for their core Notes feature (Notes today is very similar in concept to, but significantly more feature-rich than xPad and Scratch were), and the default operating system behavior to generally save and reopen documents without user action helps a lot.