Simple Journal was first released early 2014. It was a very basic app with just a white screen, a button to add notes, and another screen to act as the editor.
But the story goes back a bit further, somewhere in 2012. I was in Austria, standing on a bridge crossing a small stream of gently flowing water in a small mountain town. I can’t remember what it was but something about that very specific place was beautiful and made me happy. And I felt an urge to somehow record and preserve that moment in space and time. But I could not. Where would I have?
A year or two went past and I found myself thinking about it every now and then, being somewhere in the nature and wanting to record whatever particular place I happened to be in. So I first intended to call the app “LocaNote” or something like that. But it stayed at an idea level.
Then 2013 I got myself to work on a prototype, which I did with Apache Cordova, after thinking that would it not be cool to have a list of notes and color coded bars to help categorize them? The bars I didn’t get to, but I ended up with an app where I could write. And best of all, it wasn’t connected to the cloud, and it didn’t get in the way.
I found it very useful to have a place where I could just type anything. I found it useful in getting the creative train running without having to hold complex constructs in my mind and without having to commit them to memory either, both extremely taxing tasks mentally — and as taxing tasks they are slow and hold you down. So the end result was that with SJ I was actually now able to think through a lot more stuff and I would not forget. It supercharged my brain, in a sense.
Come 2014 and I had a native Android app ready. Again, just a white screen and a button, and the separate editor screen. I hit publish and added it to the store. No one really downloaded it and my dreams of becoming an overnight mobile app millionaire were shattered into pieces.
Fast-forward four years to 2018 and the app started to get downloads. Beats me why, but people for some reason were downloading it, installing it, and I guess, using it. But it wasn’t a terribly good app. Lacked essential features and probably the experience was all-around not quite too good.
But that got me working on it. Adding those features that were requested and fixing bugs. And now some years later, it is actually pretty good an app already. I like it. And I hope you like it too.
Even now, more than 10 years later, I still feel like this is only the beginning. Going slowly, but going far? Who knows. For me, this certainly is a long-term project, not a short-term chase of a passing fad.
All that said, Simple Journal is built on feedback from users like you (combined with sweat and tears of mine) — So what do you think, if you use SJ or plan to use it, would you be able to take a minute or two of your day? And write me email at [email protected] answering two very specific questions I have for you:
Title it for example, “Re - origin story” or anything else, doesn’t matter really, I will read it anyway. As I do every single email and review sent my way.
That would help me a ton in understanding the people who use SJ, and how SJ in fact fits in your life. Thank you!