The story behind SnipNotes (Part 1)

Welcome to my second blog series! In this blog post and the next one I want to share with you some background information about how SnipNotes became what it is today. After all, the first concept of the app had very little in common with today’s SnipNotes, even the name was different…

The app started in October 2014 as a simple clipboard manager, which should share data between iOS and OS X devices. At this time most clipboard managers were limited to a single device, so an iCloud-enabled utility sounded like a good idea. The iOS version was designed with two widgets in mind, one for copying text into the app and one for pasting it back into clipboard. The app also had a suitable name already, AirClipper!

Around christmas, AirClipper looked like this:

Looks a little different from today’s SnipNotes, doesn’t it? Of course the design wasn’t final etc., but the whole concept was limited to basically one use case: clipboard sharing. The icons were a cosmetic detail at this time, there was no content recognition. Each entry consisted of only one part, its value. The two widgets had no chance to talk to each other, so stored items didn’t show up in the “Paste Widget” immediately.

By the turn of the year, the concept of the app had to change quite a bit. On the one hand, many of the planned features like image sharing and an app for OS X were not feasible for the initial release in February due to lack of time, on the other hand and more importantly AirClipper lacked an unique selling feature to differentiate itself from its growing set of competitors, which came up with widgets and iCloud support as well.

How did AirClipper become SnipNotes? Read more about it in the next post!

Next article in this series: The story behind SnipNotes (Part 2)