It is one thing to have ideas and dreams, and it is completely another to turn them into reality. This is the story of a dream that is now reality.

Remember is an application that I have been building for almost a year now. It’s a journaling app. You might be wondering why the world needs another journaling app. Well, frankly, there is nothing quite like this out there. This calendar/photos/journaling fusion is an idea that popped into my head one day when I was sitting around bored on parental leave. After all, what do you get when you have a bored software developer? New software!

I have been doing a daily journal entry for almost 4 years now. It’s nothing crazy. Sometimes it’s a paragraph; sometimes it’s just a sentence. I wanted to start leaving a paper trail behind. Every day has meaning, and yet, they will vanish into the void unless I take time to write about them. This project was my attempt to create an interface for these entries and start adding features that complement the idea of remembering my life.

Additionally, I’ve had BeReal (a minimalistic social media app) for a couple years now, and one handy thing that comes with that is having a photo every single day. A huge motivation behind this project was combining these two datasets of mine. I wanted to see the daily photo right next to whatever I wrote that day. And let me tell you, it was super rewarding when I finally got there!

Being a young father with a full time job, I didn’t have a ton of free time to knock this out, and it has been slow going. Most of the coding for this project has been done at night on low brain power. Consistency over time is powerful though, and while it is not yet in a place where I am prepared to call it “ready,” I (and several others) have been using it for over 6 months now, and I wanted to take this opportunity to show off what it can do so far.

Right off the bat, you will notice that it looks like a calendar. One of my primary goals with this project was to be able to quickly get a picture of what a year was like. Every year is characterized by certain things. What major events happened? What trips did you go on? What books did you read? And so on.

Entries

The core of the application is writing a daily journal entry. Clicking on a day opens up the popup seen in the above screen shot. You simply write a couple sentences and close the popup. That is all you have to do in a day. The button at the top left of the month will open a popup that fuses all the daily journal entries together so that you can read them fluidly. You can also write a monthly journal entry, which looks like this:

Monthly entries are for more in-depth stories or thoughts and should be longer. All the text in every entry is encrypted, of course.

Searching

This was one of my main goals. I wanted all this data I have been writing to be searchable. So I built a search feature. Simply hit command + / to open up search and either type a keyword or a date:

What if you want to remember all the times its snowed in the last few years?

I am using my app for stuff like this all the time now. It’s really awesome. From things like finding out how many times I’ve seen Andrew Peterson live, to pinpointing what day we were at Niagara Falls, this personal life database is really handy.

Photos

Jeremy built an integration with BeReal that will automatically pull in your BeReal memories directly into Remember. If you don’t have BeReal, and you want to use Remember, I’d say you should get it, even if you don’t friend anyone. It’s so convenient to have an app on your phone that reminds you at a random point in the day to take a picture. And then that picture just magically shows up in Remember (awesome!). If you don’t want to download BeReal, you can manually upload a photo for each day within Remember. Here is what a BeReal memory looks like:

Events

This was one of the first features that I knew I wanted when I drummed up the idea for this project.

You can input the dates for a trip and choose a custom icon and color to help capture its vibe. If you click on the trip, it will pull up the journal entries and photos from the days it contains.

You can also style them to be “secondary” and that allows for stacking events if you had multiple things going on at the same time. I like to use secondary events for things like “family in town” or “kids were sick” or really anything that characterized the month.

This feature plays a big part in remembering a certain year at a glance. I can load up 2023 and very quickly remember what happened that year.

Ah, yes, that was the year we had tons of travel in August and went to the beach in September!

Another feature you’ve probably noticed is badges. My buddy Connor built the badges feature, and it’s absolutely fantastic. You can define custom badges (again, with an icon and color of choice) to be applied to any days of your choosing. You apply the badge in the day entry popup.

In this case, I used the “book club” badge on this date. Now, I can go into 2024 and with a quick scan, get an idea of how many book clubs we had. From specific things like playing disc golf, to generic things like a star or a sad face, this feature can be used however you like to help color in the picture that you are painting of your year.

What’s next

I really appreciate the help I’ve had from Jeremy, Connor, Theo, and Joby in this project. It brings me a lot of joy to see something that I dreamt up last year as a reality now, and I couldn’t have gotten this far without their help. We haven’t slowed down. I’ve got too many ideas for my own good, and some friends and I are doing our best to work on them in our extremely limited spare time. The two in progress features are:

1. Books/Albums/Movies — I’m working on adding slide out panels where you input the books, albums, and movies that you encountered in a year. Again, the point of this software is to help you remember what a year was like, and I think this is going to be a really exciting step in that direction.

2. Year hero images — Connor is working on this feature that allows attaching 6 key photos for the year that serve as the thumbnail for that year. This is another step forward in helping define a year of your life.

We’ve got tons of other features that we are excited about, such as exporting a book-style printable document of journal entries for physical safe-keeping.

If you are interested in giving this application a spin, you can find it at rememberjournal.app

Journaling is a discipline, and you will only find this application helpful if you are able to create a daily habit of journaling (we are working on more features to help with that). If you start missing days, it won’t really work. I think this app is all or nothing, and requires a certain commitment. It pays off though. I wish I had started this many years ago, and as the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, and the second best time is today.

Feel free to start using this app and reporting any bugs you find to me at josh@mcleodfamily.org