about

I made this for myself first.

I'm Aaron. I build small software under the name Tidyapps — one person, on nights and weekends, around a day job and a family. For years I carried a Field Notes in my back pocket with a bullet pencil, and 48pages is what happened when I tried to set that notebook down.

I've been slowly minimizing the physical things I keep, and the back-pocket notebook was one of them — but I still needed the thing it did for me. It started small: a scratch pad on my own computer's home screen, just somewhere to catch what was in my head. It kept growing until it was worth building for real.

The way I used the paper never changed: capture first, decide later. Get the thought down fast, and sometime afterward figure out what it wanted to be. Every scrap had exactly three fates — become a task somewhere, get filed into a more permanent home, or get scratched out and let go. Nothing else. That habit is the whole app now: roll it, file it, or tear it out.

The forty-eight-page limit is the memo book itself. A Field Notes fills, you migrate out what matters, and you start the next one — and that ending is exactly what kept the paper honest. 48pages just makes the ending a small ceremony instead of a guilty drawer of full notebooks. That's the one thing this app is about.

The other thing paper had, that most apps don't, is that nobody could read it but me. So 48pages is zero-knowledge: encrypted on your device with a key I never receive. I hold ciphertext I genuinely can't open — even I can't read your notebook. Not a policy I could quietly change later, an architecture I couldn't break if I tried. Here's exactly how.

Being one person is part of that honesty, which is why this site says I, not we — no team, no investors, no growth chart deciding what it becomes next. It's why there's no AI over your shoulder, no tracking, no streaks. Those aren't features I haven't gotten to. They're the point. It stays small on purpose — a good page, honestly kept. If that's you, I'm glad you're here.

— Aaron · Tidyapps