Sometimes you find something on the web—a link, an image, or a block of text—that you want to quickly set aside for later. Gladys is a free indie app from developer Paul Tsochantaris that acts as a sort of shelf for these kinds of things. Available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, the app supports adding anything you can drag and drop. You can also add things via the Share menu or by copying and pasting.

I find this a useful tool for turning my unstructured reading and research time into a collection of things to follow up on. When I’m researching potential article ideas, I clip links to applications I could write about and paragraphs I could cite. I used to keep them in a messy text document, but now I put everything into Gladys. Then, when I’m thinking about which articles to pitch, I can scroll back through Gladys and turn the collected links and citations into articles like the one you’re reading now.

You could use almost any application for this, granted, but Gladys stands out in that it turns everything you drag and drop into something easy to parse: drag an image and you’ll see a thumbnail, drag an article link and you’ll see a preview. You can open each item to see more detail, if you like, or preview the whole thing with Quick Look.

Gladys really shines when you turn on iCloud syncing. With that feature enabled, you can quickly add things while surfing the web on your iPhone or iPad, and follow up when you get back to your computer. I especially like it on the iPad with the Slideover multitasking feature: you can quickly drag something from the application you're using into Gladys.