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Introducing Remembary for iPad

Posted on: 2010-10-18

I'm very excited to announce that my latest big project is now available in the Apple App Store:

Remembary: The Connected Personal Journal for your iPad.

Screenshot of Remembary interface and RSS feed

Remembary is a full-featured personal journal application: very little gets in the way of entering your journal text, and you can quickly browse through your entries or use the fast search that filters as you type. You can export your journal (and RSS and Tweets) to a text file, and if you're privacy conscious, you can secure your journal with a password.

What makes Remembary different from the many other journaling apps available on the iPad is that it is connected. You can give it your Twitter username and up to three different RSS feeds - and it will download everything and automatically sort the tweets and entries into the appropriate dates.

Remembary started as a "scratch my own itch" project. Inspired by Samuel Pepys, I've been keeping a personal journal on paper since December 2003. Life gets so busy that I sometimes get a few days behind in writing in my journal and when I finally sit down to catch up, it's often difficult to remember what happened several days ago. To be honest, sometimes I don't exactly remember what happened this morning.

Remembary solves this problem by pulling down external context for each day from the internet. Just seeing what I've tweeted or blogged, or what pictures I've taken on a given day (via Flickr) can help me remember what I did.

Writing in a journal is a way of preserving my own life - and days that end up with very little or nothing in a journal feel like a piece of my life has been lost. So being able to use Remembary in the months that I've been developing and testing it has made me feel like I've been getting little pieces of my life back.

I have a thing for nice books, and have often spent upwards of $50 on nice Moleskine or leather-bound day-per-page journals at fancy shops in Yorkville. Remembary only costs $2.99, and can be downloaded right now from the App Store. Perhaps it isn't as nice to look at as a shelf of leather volumes, but it sure takes up less space, is easier to browse and search - and backing it up doesn't require hours with a photocopier.

Here's the web site for Remembary, which I will be fleshing out over the next while with a FAQ, blog posts, and more.

Let me know what you think!

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