Everything Is an Object
A movie is a thing with a title, a director, a year, and your rating. A book is a thing with a title, an author, and a genre. A task is a thing with a status and a due date. A contact is a thing with a name and an email.
They're all the same shape. A thing with some details about it.
We don't think of them that way because we've been trained by apps not to. Letterboxd is for movies. Goodreads is for books. Todoist is for tasks. Each type of thing gets its own app, its own login, its own interface. And every time you want to track something new (wine you've tried, apartments you're comparing, restaurants to visit in Tokyo) you go looking for yet another one.
But the underlying structure is identical. So why do we need a completely different app for each one?
In Scribbles, I treat everything as the same kind of thing. A movie, a book, a contact, a task, a recipe — they're all just items. What makes them different is what details they carry. You tell Scribbles "a Movie has a director, a year, and a rating" and now you can create movies, put them in lists, search for them, and track them. Same for books. Same for contacts. Same for anything.
Lists that actually connect
The interesting part is how items relate to each other.
Say you add "Inception" to your "Weekend Movies" list. Later, you also add it to "All-Time Favorites." It's the same item in both places — not a copy. If you update your rating in one list, it's updated everywhere.
This sounds like a small thing, but it's a huge deal in practice. In Letterboxd, your watchlist and your "watched" list are basically separate universes. In Goodreads, a book on your "Want to Read" shelf has no connection to the note you wrote about it somewhere else. Everything is fragmented, and keeping things in sync across apps is a job in itself.
When everything lives in one place, these connections happen naturally. The movie your friend recommended is the same item whether you're looking at your watchlist, your "recommended by friends" list, or searching for Nolan films.
Your things, your way
The built-in categories cover the common stuff: movies, books, contacts, tasks. But you can also create your own.
Everyone has things they track that no app was built for. Board games you own. Apartment listings you're comparing. Interview candidates. Fonts you like. Coffee shops with good wifi. Gift ideas for specific people.
In most tools, these end up as messy notes or rows in a spreadsheet that you set up once and never maintain. In Scribbles, you just say "a Wine has a region, a grape, a vintage, and my rating" and now you have a wine tracker. Same search, same lists, same interface as everything else.
No new app. No new account. No learning a new tool. Just your stuff, organized the way you think about it.
From a thought to a thing
This is the part I like most. You're texting yourself in Scribbles, just thinking out loud, and you mention "just watched Inception, absolutely incredible, need to watch more Nolan." That thought can become a movie item. The title, director, and year get filled in. It lands in your watchlist. You never opened a separate app or typed into a form.
Or you're reading an article and highlight a book recommendation. That highlight becomes a book item with the title and author already there, sitting in your reading list.
The gap between having a thought and having it organized is almost zero. You don't need to stop what you're doing, switch apps, find the right list, and fill in details.
Fewer apps, more life
I'm not trying to build the "everything app" for the sake of consolidation. The point isn't that fewer apps is inherently better. The point is that your personal information shouldn't be trapped in silos that don't talk to each other.
The movie your friend mentioned at dinner, the book that movie was based on, the task to actually buy that book, the contact who recommended it. These are all connected in your head. They should be connected in your tools too.
Right now, maintaining that web of connections across Letterboxd and Goodreads and Todoist and Google Contacts is your job. It shouldn't be.
If you're tired of spreading your life across a dozen apps, sign up for free and try Scribbles today.