Show HN: Minimalist offline journal app with a chat interface

Maker here. I’ve went against the grain[1] and maintained this journaling app for the third year now. This is V3 that I just pushed few months ago that added photo logs (iOS only for now unlike V2). It may help people reflect now we are entering the holidays with a new start soon.

Why make another journaling app when there are so many other Day One look-alikes? Because it’s unique in the following ways:

- Offline only, no cloud, no tracking

- Easy to export to JSON (you own your data)

- Minimalism design taken to it’s logical conclusion

- Open and type, no step 2

- Type “?” to search, no step 2

- Type “#” to use hashtag to organize

- Double-tap timeline to hide and keep logging in discreet

- Pull up the timeline to see a 100 day GitHub like heatmap

Also it tries to avoid the following anti-features:

- journal titles (my pet peeves, way too much info up front)

- Sparse timeline with main/detail layout that forces you to drill down to see your full journal entry

- Notifications/reminders

I try to expand the answer in this post too: https://thezenjournal.com/why

Feedback and suggestions welcomed. Thank you!

[1]: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1303812935773556736

The best journaling app is anything that opens a markdown file. You can always build the workflow that suits you best.

This is excellent! I've discovered that I value very similar features as I have tried other journaling apps.

I found that my personal favorite solution so far is actually a chatroom with just myself in KakaoTalk. It also has the extremely simple input, which is critical to make sure capture and journaling actually happens, and fast search using substrings and tags, which make recall simple.

EDIT: Also, automatically timestamped input! Which puts both your app and my solution a step above a plaintext file

It's not without its warts, which your app does away with. However, I personally find the ability to post photos, videos, and audio recordings very useful, and for that reason will likely stick to my existing solution for now. Regardless, it's really great to find others share similar values in journaling, and I'll be following closely! Thank you!

I think it would be fun to have Whatsapp integration, and I can easily send pictures, notes, voice notes etc to the journal. The other part could be to have a simple chat bot that provides prompts throughout the day, like "what are you doing right now?" or "take a selfie with whoever you're with."

Thank you for the kind words! Yes I've also tried a private twitter account, private slack/telegram channel, those would also work wonders if you desire something cross platform. I just realized I need something with minimum distraction, thus a dedicated UI for journal logs, which means no cloud or other people's servers, no profile images, no retweet button etc. :D

Feel free to follow the journey via our Twitter handler @thezenjournal or sign up for the newsletter if interested in following.