The Return of Fancy Tools - macwright.com

Webflow has buttons to add effects. It’s easy to add effects. Effects will be added, because there’s a button to add them. Everything for the next few years will slowly fade in as you scroll. I don’t know why. Stripe did it.

Fancy tools aren’t bad. Professional authors use Microsoft Word and they have the absolute courage, the phenomenal self-control, to never fiddle with fonts. I, however, don’t. Give me iA Writer to save me from myself.

And simple tools make you think a little more. The notetaking tool I use isn’t very good at recommending links, so I retype names and things, manually, every time that I refer to them. Would it be better if it did great autocomplete? Would it be even better if I didn’t even have to link things, and it automatically associated similar topics?

I don’t think so. As Drucker said and is written on the back of all my Field Notes notebooks, “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” The friction of having to write, to structure thoughts in plain text, to remember the name of the person I need to reference on this page: that is the point. Frictionless note-taking produces notes, but it doesn’t - for me - produce memory.