MiniJournal is an iOS / iPadOS app for capturing everyday stuff.

It main focuses are simplicity, longevity - meaning building a body of entries that may outlast the app or your device - and privacy.

With those goals in mind, I settled on these main features:

  • A very simple interface that puts the action of adding new entries top and centre.

  • A calendar to show days on which you’ve added entries.

  • Export of all diary entries in JSON format.

  • Entries are saved only as text, with a latitude, longitude, and date. No rich data is saved, such as images, videos, links, etc.

  • Photos from your photo library are shown along side entries for a given day. Photos are not stored in your diary.

  • Syncing across iCloud so you can see your entries on all your devices.

  • The ability to search entries for keywords.

As well as core features, there a are a couple of nice-to-haves:

  • Dozens of different coloured icons.

  • Dozens of different app themes.

The basic idea

Coming across one of your an old note books or diaries from years ago can be an eye opening experience, especially if you have a poor memory like I do.   I am not a diary person really, but I am a notebook person.  I buy notebooks and do nothing with them because I don’t want to ruin them.  Maybe once every few years I’ll write down some idle thoughts in them and eventually the notebook will be abandoned in a drawer somewhere.

When I come across them years later I’m frequently stunned by how much of the routine of my life at that time has faded from active memory.  None if it is really important - it’s mostly I went here and did this, then went there and did another thing.  It’s not interesting to anyone else.  But reading an old diary is like digging up old pieces of your own back story you might have, if not forgotten, had no reason to recall.


Diary Apps tho…

But I don’t really want a diary app.  I don’t want to use an app that stores photos and videos and rich text with tagging.   Because after 5 years that app will become a service and will add tiers of features and membership pricing.  It’ll become Evernote.   And a couple of years after that it’ll shutter, probably taking my entires with it.  If I’m lucky I can export them to another services, maybe.  Or I’ll die and my account with that service will languish until it’s eventually deleted.

What I really want is the app equivalent of a shoebox full of bits of paper, with text and a date written on them.   I set out to make this with MiniJournal. 

The shoebox metaphor let me settle on the core functionality of the app, which would be to 

  • Store plain text, a latitude & longitude, and a date.

  • Have no servers or accounts. So store entries locally on device, and use iCloud if possible to let the app work across devices.

  • Allow easy export, in a format that isn’t tied specifically to the implementation of the app. I settled on exporting as JSON for this. While vaguely human readable, it’s quite simple to write scripts to manipulate the entries into some other format in the future.

  • No rich data saved along side entries. As much as possible, use the device’s capabilities to surface related media for an entry’s date/time. Photos, for example, would not be saved in diary. They would be just shown from the device photo library. Photo libraries are probably one of our most treasured possessions, so I reasoned it could be relied on to persist at least as long as your journal does.