A place to put a thought down

You’re on a call, or deep in someone else’s document, and a thought arrives. A good one. Not about what’s on the screen — about the other thing, the draft, the decision you’ve been circling.

Now watch the ritual. Keep the thought alive, switch apps, find the notes window, find the right note, put it down, switch back — and try to remember where in the conversation you were. Or skip the ritual, stay present, and trust the thought to wait.

It never waits. Working memory doesn’t hold luggage. By the time there’s a socially acceptable pause, you’re left with the feeling of having had an idea, which is the saddest souvenir there is.

The thought didn’t need a filing system. It needed a place to land — right where your eyes already were.

A sheet of glass over everything

So we built one. Press a key, and a transparent layer appears over your whole desktop — every screen, every macOS Space. Think of it as a sheet of glass laid over your work.

On the glass live pads: small named scratch notes you can drag, resize, and type into. The glass only catches your clicks where a pad actually is; everywhere else, clicks fall straight through to whatever you were doing. Your desktop keeps working underneath. Esc, and the glass is gone.

That’s the whole object. Not another app to switch to — a layer that floats over all of them, so the thought lands without you leaving.

Notes you can talk to

Here’s where it stops being a sticky-note gimmick. The pads are wired to the assistant, and they’re named, so you can address them out loud.

You’re still on that call. “Open sticky.” The glass appears. “Make a pad called Draft, top left.” There it is. You say the line — the one that arrived mid-conversation — and it lands on the pad while your eyes never leave the screen. The call keeps moving. So do you. The thought is caught.

Later, the same names work as handles: “read me Draft.” “Rewrite Draft in a warmer tone.” “Move it to the center.” The assistant knows which pad is where — it sees the same layout you do.

And the pads are genuinely shared surfaces. You can click in and edit by hand; the assistant can append and edit by voice; both write to the same note. It’s not your notepad or the machine’s. It’s the table between you.

Pads accumulate, so the glass has boards — named layouts you switch between out loud: one for the article, one for the launch, one that’s just the week’s loose ends. Same belief as naming window layouts instead of dragging them, one layer up: places you can name beat places you have to aim at.

The honest edges

This is a scratch surface, not a knowledge base — pads are for the thought’s first thirty seconds, not its permanent home. When the assistant edits a pad it works by exact find-and-replace, so a vague “fix the middle bit” makes it ask rather than guess. And everything here stays on your Mac unless you’ve deliberately granted a cloud model access to these tools — a choice that gets its own piece soon.

Tonight, without us

You can test the belief with a pen. Put one sticky note — a paper one — on the edge of your monitor before your next call. When a stray thought arrives, write three words on it and return your eyes to the screen. Notice what it costs: almost nothing. Notice what you kept: the thread, and the thought.

That’s the entire idea. The glass version just means the note is already where you’re looking, takes dictation, and answers to its name.

A thought you can see is a thought you can stop holding. Give the next one somewhere to land.