This Free IOS App Is the Perfect Digital Junk Drawer, Allowing You to Save Files for Later
Sometimes you find something online—a link, an image, or a block of text—and you want to quickly put it away for later. Gladys is a free indie app from developer Paul Tsochantaris that serves as a sort of shelf for such things. The app, available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, supports adding anything you can drag and drop. You can also add items using the Share menu or by copying and pasting.
I find this to be a useful tool for turning my unstructured reading and research time into a collection of things to keep track of. When I’m researching potential article ideas, I cut out links to applications I could write about and paragraphs I could cite. I used to store them in a jumbled word document, but now I throw everything into Gladys. Then, when I think about what articles I’d like to feature, I can scroll back to Gladys and turn the collected references and citations into articles like the one you’re reading now.
Of course, you can use almost any app for this, but Gladys stands out because it turns whatever you drag and drop into something easily parsed: drag an image and you’ll see a thumbnail, drag an article link and you’ll see a preview. You can open any item to see more details if you want, or view something using the Quick View feature.
However, Gladys really shines if you turn on iCloud syncing. With this feature enabled, you can quickly add things while browsing the web on your iPhone or iPad and keep track of them when you return to your computer. I especially like the Slideover multitasking feature on the iPad—you can quickly drag something from the app you’re using into Gladys.
I also appreciate that the Mac app allows you to set up something similar to the iPad slider – in Settings you can set the app to open whenever you click and drag something to make the window convenient to use it was not. you want to save. You can also set the app to open with a keyboard shortcut or whenever the mouse touches a specific side of the screen.
There are also tools to provide context. You can tag items, color code them, and even leave notes. It’s an app that’s simple on the surface but has a lot of different uses once you dig into the settings, and it’s completely free with no upsells whatsoever. Check this out if you need a place to store potentially (but not immediately) useful items.