Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.

hey.co

139 pointsblader116 comments

Hi everyone - I've been working on this automatic journal for a long time. It takes your photos, makes them look nice, and also journals the places you go just by having your phone in your pocket. Would love your feedback!

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This is sort of off-topic, but I think it's still HN relevant and might be helpful.

The WOT (web-of-trust) plugin rates your site as untrustworthy. But the rating shows some crazy IP-based russian spam site from a year ago. I'm new to WOT so I don't understand--is this rating due to too-broad-a-wildcard in the system, or due to previous use of the site owner, or something else? (I'm hoping someone more familiar with WOT jumps in and explains what's going on here.)

In any case I rated it trustworthy on WOT so hopefully that percolates through the system eventually.

Engineer @heyday here. Thanks for letting us know :)

I think the evaluation is based on the previous owner / user of that IP address (it's hosted on S3, and IP addresses are kind of like relatives on your family's christmas get-together.) I submitted the site for re-evaluation though.

It may be relevant to note here that Manuel joined our team through a Hacker News Who's Hiring thread. =)

I was really happy to see an app I actually want to use.

Then I downloaded it, went through the introduction and hit a wall when I had to make an account or log in with facebook.

If this is a personal journal, why do I have to make an account? I would love to use the app, but I'm not going to make an account and would want it to run without having to connect to an outside server in any way.

We actually implemented the other way first, where we showed you the journal and then let you log in. The user experience ended up being more complicated then we liked in user testing.

We ask you to make an account so that we can back up your memories, in case you lose your phone, or want to see it on the web. You can turn this off in Settings, and Heyday will live completely on your device and nothing will go to our servers, and it will work fine. Sorry about that.

Just saw this reply. Maybe bring me to a screen with two buttons that say "create an account to sync" or "sync using icloud"?

Perhaps you could ask this after the user has created their first entry? If they ignore it they can setup an account/syncing later via settings.

Ok I'm in! Your reply is sufficiently reassuring :)

So I want to use this app on my phone with no backup, I just want to start making a journal. In this use case, I have 0 reason to make an account -- the whole point of the use case is avoiding making an account.

I just want to use this beautiful app, and making an account is getting in my way.

It doesn't matter to me that I can go to the settings and turn off syncing, because that feels like work I shouldn't have to do. I don't want to set up an account, which is to enable me to sink, when my goal is to turn off syncing and use the app in isolation on my phone.

Sorry for kind of lecturing on, this is meant to be a point to the greater maker community, not you specifically blader. One of the things that drives me nuts with ubuntu for instance, is that I have to do work to get to the barebones setup.

I guess I need to write a blog post about this, but the TL;DR is GIVE ME THE CORE PRODUCT AND LET ME SET UP THE FEATURES THAT I WANT. DON'T GIVE ME A GIANT AMOEBA AND MAKE ME DO WORK TO GET TO A NICE CLEAN CORE PRODUCT.

edit: just want to reinforce that that is not yelling at you, this discussion just managed to touch on an increasing frustration I have with the landscape of new products -- from companies big and small -- I hope I'm not alone in thinking a very core fundamental is being stepped on to the detriment of the user.

Why don't you just use iCloud? No account creation needed, super user experience.

Same question for me. I'd happily pay for this without an "account". I suppose that doesnt give you recurring revenue, but i can imagine things like tying up with photo album printers and dvd memoir makers may work?

Feedback... - The initial user experience is fantastic. You take people by the hand through the setup process and granting proper permissions. This is very well done.

- The account creation was fine but could have been lighter weight. You really only needed my email and could have sent me a password if the purpose is to just backup my stuff. I think you could push this so it's not part of the first launch experience. (while still hitting your goal of preserving memories)

- I love how you pulled in so much history from an initial load. I enjoyed my photos and that was awesome.

- I think there is too much emphasis on "editing." When I tap a photo or video I want to see it big or I want to play the video. I couldn't find an easy way to make photos big and playing a video was too many clicks. Same for maps... they don't get big either?

- Nice UI dynamics on the calendar control and a couple other nice touches like that.

- With a search icon I expect a text box to type a search. Consider a different icon for browsing/exploring by location. - You use the wrong iOS transition in a couple places for modal dialogs. Nit.

- Once I used the service and understood how it works I wanted to add my twitter and instagram accounts to get even more into my journal. I suspect this is a natural reaction and would be a better place to offer account creation or Facebook integration (gasp).

- There's a screen that talks about "Friend Requests" but doesn't have any clear way to do that. Coming soon or nuke the field when there aren't any friend requests.

- This could crush Facebook. Not in the short term but if you create a timeline that is more personally valuable to people they will be far more likely to use it and share it with friends and family. Your timeline is already far more interesting then my "Wall."

- Keep it up. Can't wait to see the updates.

This is so incredibly helpful. Thank you.

Nice find on the iOS transition. Search isn't is a good place, but eventually we want to do real search, so the current functionality can be considered a place holder. Unfortunate, but you have to launch some time. =)

Can you tell me more about what you mean when you say "Friend Requests? We shouldn't have any friend requests.

When you open search you see a table section header that reads "Friend Requests" I don't have any friend request but the presence of the header made me go looking for this type of functionality.

Other notes: - This morning I wanted to add a journal entry for the day. I looked for a compose button but it seems like that's only possible for things that are system created. - I like the time-travel area and local push. That's nice and seems better then TimeHop - I saw a couple things on my timeline that I wanted to delete. Swipe to delete didn't work, neither did tap and hold. Tapping the photo and dragging it into the lower shelf seemed really broken. (I later discovered I could swipe delete from the description, this took some exploration to discover)

Shoot me an email if you like.... graiz@raizlabs.com

Wow. I rarely download this stuff. But the fact that it claims to be automatic piqued my interest.

After downloading it I can say that my first impression is shocked. Shocked that I really liked it.

I think what I love about it is that it's not social. It lets me relive my recent past. It includes some photos of my kids that I wouldn't put on Facebook, for example. That leads to a much more intimate experience of my past.

Thanks so much for the feedback! I'd love to learn about what we can do better for you!

The only thing that would attract me to a "personal archive" product is being able to completely and totally own it. I want to have ownership not just over my data, but also of its presentation. If you decide you want to redesign the app and I hate it, then all of my previous time and energy is wasted.

This product immediately asserts, 'use me forever', but everything about the project says 'we raised money, and who knows how this will play out.' It always frustrates me that companies are willing to gloss over that obvious conflict when entering in to such a potentially long commitment with their users.

I don't mean to be overtly negative, but instead just want to point out something you may have overlooked. I would expect that you want to attract users who don't take these choices lightly, right?

I feel the same way. That's why we spent time building it so that all of your data lives fully on your device (it's synced to our servers for backup purposes, which you can switch off). So even if we run out of money, you can still use Heyday forever.

But less factually, I'm in love with this product and I intend to work on it for the rest of my life. Even for free.

I certainly appreciate the boldness of your personal commitment. You should add that to the site somehow.

This comment converted me to download the app. I'd strongly suggest making this more clear in your product's description! :)

I feel the same way about Keepsake and I taught myself to code 9 months ago to build it and will work on it forever. It's roughly in the same market as HeyDay, but with a different perspective around grouping content semantically and quickly sorting it to publish on your iPhone: http://www.getkeepsake.com/

Pixter (http://pixter.in/), if you mainly deal with images.

I, too, would like an app like the one you're talking about. Maybe something that plugs into Dropbox.

Ever since I started grad school in 2011 I've been thinking about needing an app to remember things. I reead about Personal Knowledge Bases. I proposed making this our innovation in my Tech Venturing class, but my group ended up going with Automated Parking Garages...

In my Cloud Computing class we had to make an Elastic Beanstalk scalable web app. I had a bit of experience with MySQL and PHP and found out about TiddlyWiki and a side project called ccTiddly which was a PHP/MySQL implementation of TiddlyWiki that stores the tiddlers in the database so you can run it as a webserver rather than transferring around the html file. I actually started attempting to convert it to SimpleDB to accomplish the project task, but ended up going with a more simple application from scratch.

I still use ccTiddly, but I'm pretty lazy with my usage, and I'm also lazy in learning how to code applications myself. I also created an account on TiddlySpace, which is a more successful python implementation of TiddlyWiki as a web server. It allows people to share their tiddlers between accounts as well as store and expert their tiddly wikis within the cloud. It is available open source, but I had trouble trying to set up my own :(

I just installed this on my iPhone. I have been looking for this. I've been so desperate for this I've been contemplating creating it myself. We need more innovation in the ability to store and recall information. If we can make it easy to automatically organize the massive amount of information about people, experiments, finances, health, etc, whatever kind of knowledge you normally have to remember with difficulty or re-google all the time. I think this is also highly tied to keeping good track of resources on the internet. What if you could bring together information about all the services you use into one private location and keep track of what you need to know?

One of the inspiring things I read about when delving into thought about this topic was the Memex:

http://alpha.uhasselt.be/jan.vandenbussche/actueletrends_121...

The tile is so vague, please:

     ShowHN: I've launched an app I've worked on for almost 2 years.
     ShowHN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years.

Fixed, thanks!

I got the biggest smile on my face when I saw pictures I had already taken get pulled into your app right after launching for the first time. It was so easy to add a note to pictures I had already taken. Immediate engagement win.

By the way, your sign-up introduction flow is awesome. I love how all the permissions I granted (location, photos) had context as to why I gave them. That's a huge deal, since most apps just ask for what they need on immediate startup and I always get really annoyed. More apps should emulate this design!

Awesome work!

Thank you! We did it the naive way at first. We iterated to the current the sign up flow to maximize the opt in rate, so not quite brilliant design, just lots of iterating! =)

I love that I didn't have to do anything and I already had a journal from my old photos. Very compelling. Overall on-boarding fantastic.

I also really appreciate that its a private journal. Sick of sharing.

Thanks, would love to hear more as you use it, there's lots to be improved!

I love the idea. I have a terrible memory, and when people ask me "remember when were at ____ on ____?". My answer, every time, is no.

If only I had an iPhone...

Congrats! I'm on a plane now so haven't been able to download but it looks like it addresses the major complaint I have about journaling apps (i.e. Day One, which I use and, for the most part, love) -- which is that if you forget/are too busy/get behind, the queue just gets bigger and bigger and more overwhelming.

I go through phases with Day One where I write every day, but sometimes I'm just too busy and instead take pics. But then you have to manually add, tag, geo-locate, and it still gets overwhelming.

If this addresses that, you've got a convert on your hands! (and probably many more...)

Congrats!

This is exactly why we built Heyday! Please try it, I think you'll love it. =)

Downloaded. Looks great so far!

One question: is it possible to add an entry without either changing locations or adding a picture? I can't seem to just add a "normal" note...?

+1 here. I forget to log with Day One pretty often (even with their Mac notifications, which give you a text field to begin writing on), but I'm also not convinced that I was as much information as something like Slogger[1] gives me. Especially with things like the new M7 sensor in the 5S, there's huge potential for passive journaling where a great deal of information can be gathered locally without ever typing a word.

[1]: https://github.com/ttscoff/slogger

I love it, its simple, automatic and it does exactly what I want. The initial tutorial is awesome - great idea! But...

I was quite disappointed when I read here, that you're actually downloading(syncing) all data to your cloud automatically. I would expect you to ask me also, in that brilliant tutorial, if I want to save my data to the cloud, since as you have mentioned, you're operating with the most sensitive data. As a result I found photos, which I really rather have in my pocket than somewhere on cloud.

Good for OP admitting they spent more than a weekend or 2 weeks on a project. Most of what we see posted boasts about how quickly they did it.

I had to create a account to comment here. I'm not the kind of person who likes this kind of app: Personal Journal, track activities, photo collages and so on.

HOWEVER, my sister is my opposite and SHE LOVED IT. She has a local (brazil) FB group of moms and first time mothers. The group has 3k members I think. She'll probably recommend it.

Amazing work, incredible on-boarding experience. Opening the app for the first time and having the past few days already perfectly chronicled for me felt truly magical. Maybe I just got lucky, but I felt like the combination of my photos, geolocation data, and time data was perfect. Thanks for showing!

Thanks for trying it out and the feedback! When the stars align Heyday can be really magic.

Why is it free? I would've paid for this. Does advertising net you more profit in the long run?

We're going to be a freemium product. Advertising would be a terrible business model given how sensitive the data we're going to have is.

Why did you spend 2 years of your life on this to give it away for free? It sounds like you don't want to benefit from this in any way, monetarily, which is interesting.

Much respect. I'm only curious...

EDIT: Whoops, I misunderstood the meaning of freemium.

Freemium is how things like Dropbox and Evernote make money, and they seem to be doing okay. =)

Hey Blader - Freemium is typically used for a landgrab, but only when there's a very specific monetization plan in place to leverage the "leads" (free users). I'm a bit concerned that you're not first to market and going straight to free. Do you have monetization thought out?

Here's a good article to consider: http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/188339/Screw-Fre...

Looks cool - but coming from being in a similar automatic-diary iOS app space (Remembary), I'm really curious about your business model.

You have a team of 9 people and you've been working for 2 years - presumably costing well into the six (seven?) figures by now? Outside of Angry Birds and such, making serious money is pretty difficult in the App Store these days. Freemium for something as personal as a diary is tricky, since advertising is obviously a no-go - are you charging for the hosting? Is there a time limit?

I'm just a solo dev working on (and promoting) apps part-time, and you're VC-funded and have a whole team including someone who was "head of revenue for CityVille at Zynga," - so presumably you have something clever up your sleeves. I'm just curious.

I'm sure Momento and Day One make good money, but that much?

Awesome app! But I am going to echo same concern as tomahertus and so many others on this page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6858853

"""

Congratulations on the launch! The app looks beautiful and the fact that it automatically does all of this for you is pretty cool. Anyway, I was wondering, are you guys funded at all? You seem to have a pretty big team. Just curious!

Thank you! We did raise a seed round from some investors. It was $2M and from a bunch of people: https://angel.co/hey

Right on! Looks like a good group behind you. Any plans for an Android version?

Yes! As soon as we make the product great on iPhone.

If you are ok with answering how long in to building it did you look to raise money and how long did it take you? Did you have a demo for them to see? It seems 1 year before launching?

This app looks great. The comments seem to be very encouraging and blader seems to have his/her head in the right place.

I really like the whole "keeping your own data" part. I'm probably too disconnected to normal smartphone users to know whether or not that point would resonate with them, but it certainly did with me. It's not really advertised on the front page. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. We may all be in an HN thought bubble :)

I'm not a smartphone user, but something like this makes me want to get an iphone...

Nice work!

When I read the title I got concerned that you worked on something for 2 years without testing the market with a quick prototype, but looking at your site I'd say your likely to succeed. Excellent execution!

This is great! I could definitely see myself using this if my life was more interesting than home -> work -> home (mon-fri).

And if weather permits, home -> beach -> home (weekends).

Ha! That's basically what mine looks like too most of the time, but I've found that it makes me want to make my life more interesting.

I work from home (home -> home -> bar -> home).

I work from home and brew my own beer. (home -> home -> home -> home)

That's what I think when I see these "one second of every day of my life for the last year" videos. Mine would put you to sleep. I need some hobbies...

Here's an interesting example of where time to market really matters. I've had Memoir since upgrading to iOS7, and I'm pretty happy with it. So it feels like you're late to the party by several months. Bit of a bummer since it sounds like you put a lot of effort in.

Conversely, when Memoir came out, they couldn't handle their anticipated scale, but they got their foot in the door. Seems to be a good case for "just shipping it".

That's cool. I use Memoir too, and it's a great app. I think you'll find that Heyday does things a little differently and is good for other use cases, like traveling or keeping a journal.

I see Memoir has a fairly rubbish review score on itunes (3.5/5) whereas Heyday looks good (4.5)

There was an article on HN today talking about Dropbox and how at the time when Dropbox was launched there were hundreds of similar solutions. The gist of it was that the "first to market" concept wasn't a roadblock but simply a hurdle that can and has been overcome.

Beautiful app! It was a no-brainer setup and just worked! It so happened, I was listening to spotify while installing this app and it automatically pulled images and built a nostalgic video for me from the pictures I had stored! Just for that feature alone, I would use it. May be you can think about "centering" pictures and avoid zooming into dull areas etc.

But great inspiring job! Congrats!

Thank you! We're working on exactly that - detecting nice faces and features in your photos to make them look better in your collages and slideshow.

Awesome! Look forward to it.

Congrats on the launch, Siqi and team. Beautiful app.

Thanks Ryan! Appreciate the support.

This app is awesome.

Question for developers: How can I delete stuff that you automatically journal? For example, I take pictures of white boards in meetings. I don't want them in my journal. I'd like my journal to be curated for future viewing.

Also, feature request: password protection. I don't anyone with access to my phone to be able to open the app.

You can swipe right on the title of any moment to delete it. =)

Passcode is coming, it's a pretty frequently requested feature.

I've used it and the first time I immediately saw benefit. Key awesome features include: intuitive design, really easy to share, and it's definitely something that could compete against a lot of photo apps out there that don't make it NATURAL to share and curate your photos.

Android soon?

Thank you so much for the kind words. We're working on way better automatic photo beautifiers (scene/face detection + automatic cropping).

60 seconds in and it looks fantastic.

Awesome launch / onboarding process. You explained each permission just before asking for it. So well done.

Suggestion -- can you use the M7 chip to detect when I've walked / run a distance worth remembering?

Hi Rob, Employee @ Heyday here -- while i can't promise anything M7 support is definitely on our radar :)

-Yi

She's a beaut, nice work. I'm sure the NSA will greatly appreciate this also.

If you disable syncing it's as secure as your device is ... which is to say probably not that secure. =(

Security against NSA/espionage really shouldn't be a concern considering nobody that paranoid would even use this app, let alone pay for it.

Nobody that paranoid should use an iPhone. Or any phone, actually...

One thing that I've always liked about OhLife is that they send me an email everyday to keep track of my journal entries, anyway of integrating that in? I keep a zero inbox so this works out for me really well.

Yes! You should be getting a notification every so often to surface a nice memory or remind you to write. This is kind of annoying right now, but we're making it better!

Excellent app. Free idea - Have an in-app purchase to have a hard cover printed journal for every year. Having a journal in a smartphone is good but a hard cover print gives a different feeling to those memories.

I thought the same - similar to what Paper does with their journals.

Curious to know how you and other people on HN think about how this stacks up to existing journaling apps, like Day One and Memoir. Do you see it replacing Day One or complementing other apps like that?

I'm a fan of both of those products. I think different people are going to like different things. Heyday isn't the best product for very introspective people to write about their lives (we actually don't even let you write a new text note right now!), so DayOne is probably going to be better for people like that.

For people who are lazy, travel a lot, and take a lot of photos, Heyday is the best product for those people. Of this I'm fairly sure.

I totally get that. From playing with Heyday for a few minutes I noticed that it's not a replacement, but it's a great way to consolidate photos.

Just downloaded. Looks great so far! I think you the entire idea of photo collages, filters, mashed with geolocation is simply cool here.

Great job! One of the best I've played with in a while. Apple needs to pay attention, iOS natively should have something like this.

Fantastic. Great job. Also, well done for sticking to a side project for so long and releasing it, that's rare.

Thanks! To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that it's a side project. We've been working on it as a team of 2-9 for the past 18 or so months.

Looks great! I wish I could use it on my phone, which is an android (galaxy note ii.)

I am floored by you weaving feature explanations with permission grants. That is art.

Totally agree. Super-elegant. Often the permission grant seems like you're doing the app a favor. In this case it seemed like the app was doing you a favor.

Sort of... though just to nit-pick a bit, an application should never feel like it's doing you a favor (Heyday doesn't). It should feel like it completely defers to you. But we agree.

Digging this. Great organization, photo layouts, filters: great presentation overall.

It's a beautiful app, and I like just about everything about it.

Generally, when I look at apps like this, I immediately think of ways I could be doing it better (often, I'm wrong, but nevermind that) -- but with this, it seemed like everything I thought of was in the very next screenshot as I scrolled through.

It looks great (thought I would make the logo on the website much bigger -- probably twice as large). The site is fantastic -- and I especially love being able to flick through the iphone on the page.

I'm an Android user, so I can't check the app proper, but I'd expect good things from it from what I see. Congratulations on shipping.

Thank you so much, that's such a nice compliment to our team. We're working on Android as soon as we can, but we're a very small team of 9 people.

Any plans to release for Windows Phone?

None at the moment, the numbers just don't make sense for our very small team right now. =(

Any place we can get notified when this drops for Android?

Agree with this comment -- very well done!

I shouldn't have pre-judged this app. I actually really like it.

Why did you build this? I'm curious about your motivation.

Wow, really beautifully done. Simple, elegant, useful, and fun.

Thank you, all credit goes to our amazing team: http://www.hey.co/about

I am very impressed.

Just saw it got featured on the app store, nice work!

Would be sweet to see the stats of the launch!

Is there a backup or data download function?

We do sync the data to our servers, which you can switch off. We've engineered it so that if you just want to keep the data on your phone, the app will still work fine, and you can rely on your iTunes/iCloud backups.

Any plans for a kind of "export"? I like this idea a lot, as someone with a terrible memory but that doesn't use social media like Foursquare. I would only worry about a way to have my data permanently. Outside of the app which could be pulled from the AppStore at any time.

This is literally our #2 most requested feature. We so want to build this.

If we do get pulled from the App Store, it will still be on your phone, so as long as you don't delete it you'll be fine.

I don't consider being on my phone to really be an archive. People change phones, etc. Looks awesome but I wouldn't seriously use it if I couldn't export the data--in whatever degraded form--to a standard format. Frankly some sort of PDF export would be fine.

Engineer @heyday here. We've already got an export-to-json prototype, but it's not quite ready for the public yet. And of course we want to export into a beautiful format for the average user as well.

Export to html would be nice so it could look pretty in my laptop browser.

I basically can't use any journal app either unless I can export and own the data - as in, remix it into a different format if I choose. I've used two journal apps so far and have lost journaling data both times (both apps still exist). If there's a journaling app that lets me export to text/metadata every week to store in some repo, but where I still prefer to use that app for input and display purposes... that's a great journaling app.

Excellent work, super polished app!

Commenting in thread for when OP becomes a millionaire. Calling it right now.

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