about

I made this for myself first.

I'm Aaron. I build small software under the name Tidyapps — one person, on nights and weekends, around a day job and a family. For years I carried a Field Notes in my back pocket with a bullet pencil, and 48pages is what happened when I tried to set that notebook down.

I've been slowly minimizing the physical things I keep, and the back-pocket notebook was one of them — but I still needed the thing it did for me. It started small: a scratch pad on my own computer, just somewhere to catch what was in my head. It kept growing until it was worth building for real.

The way I used the paper never changed: capture first, decide later. Get the thought down fast, and sometime afterward figure out what it wanted to be. Every scrap had exactly four fates — become a task somewhere, get filed into a more permanent home, get gathered with related thoughts, or get scratched out and let go. Nothing else. That habit is the whole app now: roll it, file it, gather it, or scratch it out.

There's a fifth thing a scrap can do now: leave. I'm always catching ideas in here, and some of them want to become real writing — an outline, then a piece. So I built a way to ferry a scrap onward, out of 48pages, to the tools where I actually write: TheSlot to shape the idea, Endpaper to write and publish it. 48pages is where an idea starts; ferrying is how it goes on down the river. Each tool stands alone — but caught, shaped, written, sent, they're one current from a one-line thought to a finished piece.

The forty-eight-page limit is the memo book itself. A memo book fills, you migrate out what matters, and you start the next one — and that ending is exactly what kept the paper honest. 48pages just makes the ending a small ceremony instead of a guilty drawer of full notebooks. That's the one thing this app is about.

The one thing paper couldn't do was keep itself private. Anyone who picked it up could read it — and most apps are worse, because the company behind them can read everything too. That's the strongest difference between the paper and this: 48pages is zero-knowledge, encrypted on your device with a key I never receive. I hold ciphertext I genuinely can't open — even I can't read your notebook. Not a policy I could quietly change later, an architecture I couldn't break if I tried. Here's exactly how.

Being one person is part of that honesty, which is why this site says I, not we — no team, no investors, no growth chart deciding what it becomes next. It's why there's no AI over your shoulder, no tracking, no streaks. Those aren't features I haven't gotten to. They're the point. It stays small on purpose — a good page, honestly kept. If that's you, I'm glad you're here.

— Aaron · Tidyapps