Thought Train

NOTE: Thought Train is pay-what-you-want until the end of April. During the trial period, or once it ends, you can pay any amount (even $0) and keep the app forever.

It’s important to be able to take quick notes on your desktop; applications that let you do that soon become essential tools for organizing your daily activities. And since developers already know this, there are countless notes applications waiting for you to use, starting with Microsoft’s own Sticky Notes that became popular with Windows 7.

Every so often, there comes an app that suggests it tries to do the whole note thing a bit differently. Thought Train is one of these apps, so let’s see if it lives up to its promise.

The aptly named Thought Train was designed with the idea of allowing you to quickly write something down, while also not getting in the way of your workflow. For this reason, it resides in your system tray, so that you can access it only when you need it.

Its interface is minimalistic and doesn’t allow for a lot of customization, meaning it will stay the same size and color. You can easily create notes by going to the text box at the top of the window, where you can just type something. You’ll then be prompted to the note editor, which will seem easy to use if you know Markdown; if not, then you could probably get used to it quickly, provided it worked properly.

Theoretically, Thought Train allows you to stylize your notes with Markdown, but when I tested it, whichever words were supposed be *bold* were actually displayed in italics. The emoji will appear as soon as you type them, though, so at least you can have fun with that feature.

Back in the main interface, you can rearrange your notes, view them in Compact Mode, hide them from the menu bar (which actually means hiding them from the tooltip that you get when you hover your cursor over the app’s icon in the system tray) or mark them as done. While the Thought Train’s minimalistic design may attract some users, it’s a bit too simplistic and robust to be considered an essential note-taking tool.