Notebooks
For writing that starts somewhere other than your desk.
A notebook is a domain-specific capture app that publishes the field side of a blog into Contency as a structured dossier — ready to write from, never reconstructed back at the desk.
The model
Capture in the world. Write at the desk. Nothing lost in between.
Some blogs are written from notes. Some are written from a trail, a kitchen, or a boat. For those, the desk is the wrong place to start — the material is already gone by the time you sit down.
A notebook handles that part. It is a small, focused app for the way that domain's work actually happens, with one job: send what you captured back to Contency in a shape the studio can read. Routes, media, locations, observations, voice notes — packaged as a dossier the moment the trip ends.
The studio is where the post gets written. The notebook is where the post gets collected.
The first notebook
Field Notebook
Android · iOS to follow
For travel, hiking, sailing, cycling, and outdoor writing. Field Notebook tracks your route in the background, lets you drop waypoints with a tap, captures photos and short voice notes on the trail, and packages the whole trip into a Contency dossier the moment you tell it the trip is done.
The design rule is the phone goes away: capture should be fast enough that you can put the phone back in your pocket and be present where you actually are. Voice notes carry the part you were going to forget; the rest gets written when you're home.
Field Notebook has been in production use on Spothunter.nl for the entirety of its existence. Every post on Spothunter began as a Field Notebook trip.
Route
GPS track recorded continuously in the background. Battery-friendly, accurate where it matters.
Waypoints
Drop a marker for a viewpoint, a wildlife sighting, a shelter, a campsite. Geotagged and timestamped.
Photos
Captured in-app or pulled from the camera roll, attached to the trip with their location and moment intact.
Voice notes
The fastest way to leave a thought for future-you. Contency turns them into searchable text on upload.
The model is extensible
Travel is the first domain. It is not the last.
A notebook for recipes — ingredients captured at the source, step photos in the kitchen, cook times measured rather than guessed. A notebook for gear reviews — the unit tested, the conditions logged, the comparisons aligned. A notebook for match reports, club logs, build journals, foraging walks, restoration projects.
Each domain has a shape of its own. Each writer has a way of working that the desk-first tools miss. A notebook is the answer to the question, what would the perfect capture app for this kind of blog look like?
The studio is the same in every case. The notebook is what changes.
Building a notebook
If you run a blog where the writing starts somewhere other than your desk, and the domain doesn't have a notebook yet, we'd like to hear about it. The next notebooks get built around real blogs, not hypothetical ones.