Introducing Slips: Five Notes, and That's the Point

I have a confession about notes apps: every one I’ve ever used eventually became a junk drawer. It always starts clean. Then a few months in there are hundreds of notes, a stack of folders I never open, and the grocery list I actually need buried somewhere underneath all of it. The app meant to keep me organized had quietly become the thing that needed organizing.

For a long time I figured the fix was more structure. Better folders, smarter tags, some tidy system I’d finally stick to. It never worked. The fix turned out to be less. There are a few apps that came close, but none that were perfect. So I made Slips.

The whole idea: five notes

Slips gives you five notes. Not five hundred, not unlimited. Five. That sounds like a limitation, and it is, on purpose. Five is enough for the handful of things you genuinely keep coming back to, and few enough that you never have to go searching, because you already know where everything lives. No folders, no archive, no setup. You pick a slip and you write.

Each slip gets its own name, icon, and color, and they sit one tap away at the bottom of the screen. The whole app takes on the color of the slip you’re in, so a glance tells you where you’ve landed. Right now, mine are Today, Grocery, Books, Trips, and Gifts.

Five slips, five real uses

The limit does something useful before you’ve typed a word: it makes you decide what actually matters, then it gets out of the way. Here are the ones that have stuck for me, and for the people I’ve handed it to:

• Today holds the day’s loose ends. The three things I can’t forget before dinner, a phone number someone rattled off too fast, the thing I promised a church member I’d follow up on. I wipe it and rewrite it constantly, and that’s exactly what it’s for.
• Grocery is finally, always, in the same place. I tap it in the store and check things off as they land in the cart.
• Books exists because I’m an avid reader and like to keep track of what I’ve read recently and what I plan to read.
• Trips is where I put confirmation codes, itineraries, links to interesting restaurants, addresses, and the Airbnb door code.
• Gifts is the one I add to all year, so December is a little less of a scramble.

Yours won’t look like mine, and that’s the point. Recipes, kids’ clothing sizes, a packing list, the running tally of house projects you keep meaning to start, with the room dimensions handy for when you do. You get five. For the things you actually return to, five is plenty.

The quiet parts that matter

A few things were non-negotiable for me, so they’re just built in. Your slips sync through your own private iCloud, with no account to create and nothing collected or tracked. The App Store privacy label reads “Data Not Collected,” and it means it. Every device keeps a daily backup, restoring takes one tap, and you can export everything to a file whenever you want. It’s your writing, and it stays yours.

It also fits each device instead of fighting it. Your slips are tabs on iPhone and a sidebar on iPad and Mac, and the Mac version is a true Mac app, with formatting in the menu bar and Cmd+1 through Cmd+5 to jump around. There are Home and Lock Screen widgets, a Control Center button, Siri and Shortcuts, and a share sheet for sending text in from anywhere.

Available today

Slips is out now on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The trial gives you one slip and never expires, so you can live with it a while before deciding anything. If five slips fit your brain the way they fit mine, there are monthly, yearly, and lifetime options, and one purchase covers all your devices (and family members through family sharing).

If your notes app has quietly turned into a junk drawer too, give Slips a try. The full rundown is on the Slips page, or you can download it on the App Store.