ShoveBox, a handy little virtual shoebox for gathering ideas

I just installed a nifty little tool for the Macintosh called ShoveBox that does one thing very well: it sits there quietly in your menu bar, waiting for you to toss in little bits of stuff—web pages, text scraps, short typed notes, clipboard content—and it squirrels them away for later on.

There are many large content-management tools out there that provide similar drop-box functionality, but this one seems to have a sweet spot for simplicity.

The documentation states right from the get-go that ShoveBox is not ”a comprehensive solution for organizing every aspect of your life,” nor is it a file repository.

But it’s a slick way to gather thoughts as they come to you. For example, I just set up a rule that says “put notes that begin with blog in a folder called Blog Ideas.” Now I hit a hotkey, type “Blog: do a short post on ShoveBox” and that note gets filed under “blog ideas.” There it waits until the next time I open the box to peek at my scraps.

I really like simplicity in software—applications that do one thing very well and applications that I can use right away and be productive.

The developer recently posted about “Everything Buckets” where he describes the niche of ShoveBox.

(disclosure: I received a free license via Macheist, and you can too if it isn’t too late)