Shooglebox — The PWA That Will Benefit All Writers

A research and curation tool that works across all platforms

Photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

Working on a Chromebook throws up plenty of challenges, not least regarding finding full-featured and/or compatible apps for Chrome OS. Android apps often lack features when compared to their big brothers on Windows or Mac systems. Chrome OS itself is a browser-based operating system.

Cue Progressive Web Apps (PWA). PWA’s are becoming much more common. Not only that, if an app lacks a dedicated PWA but works in the browser you can go ahead and create your own. In the top right-hand corner of your Chrome browser click the 3 vertical dots, select More tools, then Create Shortcut, in the pop-up window that follows tick the Open as window checkbox. It is as simple as that. Now that you know how to create a PWA, let’s take a look at one of my favourites.

Shooglebox

According to the blurb on their website:

Shooglebox is a research and content curation tool for quickly gathering all sorts of information for future use, exploration or sharing with others.

If you’ve ever used Pocket or Evernote, then you’ll be familiar with this kind of app. Shooglebox does differ from the others though and in not insignificant ways.

Boxes and Cards

Within Shooglebox, you create boxes. These boxes are your topics or subject matter.

image courtesy of the author

As you can see from the image above, I’ve several boxes on the go at any one time. I can name a box then add an image of my choosing to easily find my box. I can change the layout to increase/decrease the sizes of the boxes. All pretty simple, but pretty effective.

Within my boxes are my cards.

To add a card, click the large PLUS sign in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen within your box. This will bring up the following pop-up window: