Card Buddy - Index Cards
Outline, plot & beat sheets
Free · In-App Purchases
Card Buddy turns your screen into an infinite corkboard for index cards. Drag cards anywhere on the canvas and watch neighboring cards glide out of the way — outlining your story should feel as natural as moving notecards on a desk.
Perfect for screenwriters, novelists, and anyone who thinks in cards. Lay out your beat sheet, rearrange plot points, and build your story one card at a time.
Features:
- Drag-and-drop index cards on a free-form canvas, with neighbors that move out of the way automatically
- Two-sided cards — type a summary on the front, details on the back
- Add images to any card for storyboards and moodboards
- Three text styles: Plain, Auto-style (instant headers and subtitles), and Markdown
- Kanban layout to organize cards into columns
- Built for Mac and iPhone — your boards go where you do
Whether you're breaking a screenplay, plotting a novel, or organizing research, Card Buddy keeps your ideas movable.
Terms of use:
https://www.ussherpress.com/cardbuddy/terms/
Privacy policy:
https://www.ussherpress.com/cardbuddy/privacy/
more - Fixed layout issues with text sometimes getting cut off in the card
- Improved text readability when zooming out of canvas
- Improved quality of images rendered in cards
- Improved speed of loading Kanban documents with many images. Previously the app would stall on these files but it should now load immediately.
1.4.13 3 Jun
- Fixed an issue where saving the document could conflict with the document autosave, leading to file save conflict dialogs appearing.
- File save on larger documents with many images should be faster with this update.
1.4.12 24 Mar
- Minor iOS 26 bug fixes and improved error reporting in purchase flow
1.4.11 13/10/2025
- Minor bug fixes
1.4.10 20/08/2025
This update improves keyboard support on iOS:
- Fixed keyboard support on iPadOS, which stopped working with a previous iOS update.
- Improved keyboard support on iOS while editing a card: similar to the Mac version, if you move to the start of the text editor, and press left or up, you can navigate to the neighboring cell. Likewise, if you move to the end of the text editor and press right or down, you can move to the neighboring cell.
- Added shortcuts to cut, copy, and paste on iOS (cmd-C, cmd-X, cmd-V).
- Hitting Esc while editing within the canvas view will now save your changes
- In focus mode, you can now press Spacebar to flip a card, Return to start editing, Left and Right arrow keys to navigate.
1.4.9 20/03/2025
Made several speed improvements:
- Documents that have lots of images should load much faster now
- Scrolling around a canvas with many cards should feel snappier
- Saving to document is faster
1.4.8 12/11/2024
- Added a menu to change card arrangement (how dropped cards push other cards) to the ellipsis menu
- Added new card arrangement setting to disable auto-arranging of neighboring cards when a card is picked up
- Your zoom level on a document, the scroll position, and the cursor location are now saved and restored
1.4.7 01/08/2024
- You can now import from CSV files. This makes it possible to import cards that were previously made using Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or Apple Numbers. One card is generated per cell found.
- You can export to CSV and XLSX (Microsoft Excel) as well! This is a great way to take your cards and load it into a spreadsheet app (Sheets, Excel, Numbers).
- Fixed issue with importing Markdown files where "***" separator was not honored when creating multiple sides. (Card Buddy outputs multiple sides with "***" as the separator between sides.)
1.4.5 18/07/2024
- Fixed potential crash bug during import or drag and drop in older iOS versions.
1.4.4 03/07/2024
- It's now possible to drag and drop text files and markdown files into the canvas.
- Simplified how drag and drop of multiple cards works. They will now be dragged while retaining their shape.
- Added import from text file and markdown file. Lines with "---" in them will be treated as separators between cards.
- Improved scroll and zoom behavior.
- Added chroma key background color options to help with chroma keying in videos.
There are lots of bug fixes and UI tweaks in this update. Please visit https://www.ussherpress.com/cardbuddy/update-history/ for more details.
1.4.3 16/05/2024
- Fixed issue with app sometimes not detecting a purchase on launch
1.4.2 19/03/2024
- Improved Printing: You can now print the entire canvas to a single page.
- Export directly to PDF. You can export the entire canvas to a single page PDF, and without having to go through the print screen.
- Bug fixes: This update fixes issues that some users had with launching the previous version of the app.
1.4.1 29/01/2024
- Printing is finally here! Print your cards, or export to PDF file.
- Improved Export to Markdown. Select two or more cards and only those cards will be exported.
- Auto-style body text is now naturally aligned, to match Markdown and plain styling.
- More consistent fonts in text formatting.
1.4.0 25/01/2024
Search is finally here! This really improves the usability of the app and has been a long time coming.
- Fixed zoom behavior; the card should be centered a bit better now when you double-tap to zoom or the card is edited.
1.3.1 21/12/2023
This is a huge update for the app and improves a ton of stuff. I hope you enjoy it!
- Arbitrary card placement - You can now place cards all over the board even in the traditional storyboard mode.
- Better card arrangement options - Cards will automatically shift out of the way in all modes now. No more stacking by default!
- More layout customization options - You can now switch between grid and kanban layout on the fly. Additionally, you can change whether cards should lay out horizontally, vertically, or as a stack.
- Full copy/paste support - You can now select multiple cards and cut/copy/delete/paste them at once.
- Smarter dragging and dropping - Card Buddy will detect when you are dragging and dropping several cards and either treat them as a cluster or a sequence. If you have a large cluster of cards, the cards will move out of the way at the drop location.
- Improved card selection and copy/paste UI - You can now long-press on the canvas to begin selecting multiple cards. After selecting several cards, you now have a toolbar to cut/copy/paste/delete or style the cards.
Much, much more! Be sure to take a look at the What's New file to see what has changed.
1.3.0 11/12/2023
- The file browser has been updated to the more powerful iOS file browser. You can now easily move, copy, and delete files and folders. It's also possible to save files to your iCloud drive to easily edit across multiple devices.
- Moved flip button to card toolbar from context menu. Moved delete button to context menu.
1.2.5 30/09/2023
Many improvements in this update!
- Improved zoom behavior: zooming in and out of the canvas now feels more natural. Double-tapped cards are now
centered and positioned towards the top of the screen. Double-tapping the same card now consistently zooms out.
- Quicker navigation with arrow keys: left and right arrow keys at the bottom of the screen make it easy to browse
through your cards in a linear order.
- Double-tap while editing a card has been disabled: when editing a card, you can now double-tap words to select them, as you would expect.
- Swipe navigation while in focus mode: You can now swipe left/right while in focus mode. This is a great way to quickly browse through the cards on your canvas. You can even swipe while in edit mode, which makes it super easy to create multiple notes quickly!
- Greatly improved image viewing: you can now zoom in on images when viewing them in focus mode. Cards that are image-only will now expand the image to fill the view. You can now tap on images that are accompanied by text to view them in a full-screen view.
- Several Color Updates: card and background colors have been improved to be easier on the eyes.
- Duplicate Card Now Moves The Cursor: When you duplicate a card, the cursor will move to inserted card, after your previous cursor location.
- Easier to duplicate cards: the duplicate button has been moved out of the ellipsis menu to be more prominent.
- Added camera button to make it possible to take a photo and directly insert it into the canvas.
- Several icon and toolbar updates to make the app easier to use and understand.
- Minor Undo Bug Fixed: Previously, if you started editing a card and then made no edits, the app would treat that as an edit and an undo action for it. This has been fixed.
1.2.4 14/09/2023
Fixes issues users were seeing with in-app purchase.
If you continue to see issues with your Pro purchase not showing up on launch, please email support (at) ussher.ca.
1.2.3 29/08/2023
- Greatly simplified the file browsing experience
- Made double-tap behavior more natural. It will zoom in or zoom out.
- Editing a card now causes the scroll view to zoom on the card if you were zoomed out
- Improved the initial zoom level on larger canvases
- Fixed bug where panning the scroll view would fail when starting on selected card
- Removed paywall on creating new documents to make it easier to test drive the app
- Added new sample documents and made app launch in Samples folder
- Updated app icon
1.2.2 07/08/2023
- Fixed layout issues with text sometimes getting cut off in the card
- Improved text readability when zooming out of canvas
- Improved quality of images rendered in cards
- Improved speed of loading Kanban documents with many images. Previously the app would stall on these files but it should now load immediately.
more Version 1.4.13 3 Jun
Data Not Collected The developer does not collect any data from this app.