Running a blog has a lot of perks, one of which is being able to live most of your life in a browser without ever needing anything else to get your job done. Sure, native apps help for a lot of things but 90 percent of the time I’m just jumping around a dozen browser tabs. Something I need, but often find myself without, is quick access to a scratchpad. Somewhere to write something down really quickly, and then move on. Opening an app to do that, filing it in a system like Evernote, especially when it’s something as simple as a quick phone number, is pointless.
Thanks to this quick hack form Jose Jesus Perez Anguinaga, you can now turn a browser window or tab into a quick scratch pad or note pad with one quick line of code in a browser’s URL bar. It works in Chome, Safari, and most modern day browsers:
data:text/html, <html contenteditable>
I know, it looks scary, and unless you’re a developer you’re probably gonna have a hard time remembering it. So, to solve that problem, you could bookmark the page. You could set up a Text Expander snippet, or even a text replacement setting in the Language & Text section of your System Preferences. I set it up as a Text Expander snippet, but that’s just how I prefer to roll.
For the record, this is a scratch pad. It won’t save. It won’t sync. It will, ultimately, end up disappearing in one way or another. Use it wisely.
