Back when I was on Windows, I would often make various lists of things in text files and stick them on my desktop somewhere. Text files were fast, easy, and required little thought about fonts, text size, etc. While the creation of the text files were easy, organization of the files was certainly not. Once I had a number of lists, my desktop (or the folder they were in) became this crazy explosion of files. When I found xPad on the Mac, my lists became so much easier.

xPad is a free application from Garrett Murray. xPad is like an all in one TextEdit and document folder. You can create files from within the application and then access then from the expandable document drawer (see pic). You have the flexibility to change the font, text size, font color, highlight text, text strikethrough, and more.

I use xPad to jot down short notes about things I want to remember, copy for web pages, conversations about specific topics, and packing lists. xPad is absolutely perfect for those short little files of text that you are working on where you don’t care about text formatting. xPad makes it dead simple to refer back to the text files later. I open xPad every time I go on a business trip or go camping. I have a packing list for both occasions inside xPad that makes it very easy to pack.

xPad is a free application that requires OS X 10.3 or higher. The application seems to be no longer in active development, but it has worked just fine for me in Leopard. Every time I upgrade my OS, I just use the handy export feature to make sure I have a backup of my xPad files. At one point the application was going to go open source, but that hasn’t happened yet. If you just want to toss some text into a file, xPad might be the application you’re looking for.