Introducing Wastebasket

I just launched a writing app called Wastebasket. I designed it for one simple purpose — to write a first draft without distraction and without editing. There's no spelling or grammar checking. There are no AI writing tools. Wastebasket can hardly do anything. You can't even make something bold. That's on purpose. 

Wastebasket is free. There are no accounts, no tracking. Your writing never leaves your device and it works offline. You can use it by going to wastebasket.app and just starting to write. 

Here's a video showing it in action.

If you write words, I'd love for you to try it out and let me know your thoughts.

I created Wastebasket because writing is difficult for me — especially getting the jumble of ideas in my head out and on the page. At best, things are in the wrong order, misspelled, and at least one word in each sentence is just missing. Also, I don’t know how grammar works. I only know if I've seen or heard something written that way before. 

For me, every writing app seems designed to never let me just write. The default settings are like having someone sitting there looking over your shoulder as you type. Sure, you can go into the settings and turn all that off but then you have to go back and turn it all on again later. Maybe someone at Microsoft or Google will add a big Draft/Edit toggle in the toolbar. That's one possible solution. Another is Wastebasket. It works with everything!

Certainly, I've been inspired by other writing apps. The first thing like this I used was WriteRoom (a Mac-only app) back in about 2012. It's probably the closest to Wastebasket in terms of limited features. Lots of apps have adopted some sort of feature like this but they're all still editing apps at heart. iA Writer falls into this category. It's also very pretty. Then I bought the Freewrite Alpha. It's a very cool, but in my opinion, flawed piece of hardware. It did succeed, though, at letting me just fucking write. That's about all it can do. And that's when I started thinking that, for me, the ideal solution would look like iA Writer, work like the Freewrite Alpha, and be compatible with any workflow. 

Last month I was reading Enshittification by Cory Doctorow (highly recommended), and I realized that this would make a great web app that I'm confident I can keep from becoming shitty. So I pulled out this sketch I did a few months ago and got to work.

Coming up with a name for a writing app is hard. There are millions of them and they already make use of any word that has anything to do with writing. I was inspired by the old typewriter trope of crumpled-up false starts tossed in the bin. Wastebasket.com, like any word in English, was already taken but .app was not! I spent some time trying to come up with a more or less literal take on the name for an icon but they were all unreadable at small sizes. So I ended up going with the only important part of the UI — a letter and the caret. 

A side quest in making this was to add an animation that was fun AND had a purpose. I knew that I didn't want a trash can button for my app called Wastebasket, so I made a custom one. But even so, the label under my wastebasket button said, "Trash" for most of the time I was making this. I tried "delete""start over", and "throw away" but I wasn't crazy about them. What I did kind of like about throw away was that it was connected to the idea of crumpled pieces of paper being tossed into a wastebasket. I started thinking about making animations of paper being thrown into the wastebasket button. But where would they come from? Nowhere. The icon could crumple and uncrumple, and the action should be "toss." That works well with "copy" and "save", the other actions you can can choose from.

I had a lot of fun making this and I have to say it's now my favorite writing tool. I've been using it every day. My favorite place is at my desk on my big monitor. It also works really well on the iPad with the keyboard. You can use it on a phone but it seems impractical to me. I never sit down to write on my phone. For me, that's more notes app territory. 

This post was written with Wastebasket and edited in Obsidian.