

Show HN: I've launched my iPhone journal app I've worked on for almost 2 years. - blader
http://hey.co
Hi everyone - I&#x27;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!
======
IvyMike
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.

~~~
maebert
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.

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

------
Jormundir
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.

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
aufreak3
Just saw this reply. Maybe bring me to a screen with two buttons that say
"create an account to sync" or "sync using icloud"?

~~~
kiernan
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.

------
graiz
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.

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
graiz
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

------
jmathai
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.

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

------
state
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?

~~~
blader
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.

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

------
boyaka
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...](http://alpha.uhasselt.be/jan.vandenbussche/actueletrends_1213/still_memex.pdf)

------
bliker
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.

~~~
blader
Fixed, thanks!

------
blakesmith
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!

~~~
blader
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! =)

------
methehack
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.

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

------
richardlblair
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...

------
nlh
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!

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

~~~
nlh
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...?

------
tomashertus
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.

------
pekk
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.

------
rffa
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.

------
johncoogan
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!

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

------
sillysaurus2
Why is it free? I would've paid for this. Does advertising net you more profit
in the long run?

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
sillysaurus2
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.

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

~~~
pccampbell
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...](http://blog.priceintelligently.com/blog/bid/188339/Screw-Freemium-Use-
a-Free-Trial)

------
shiven
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6858853)

"""

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.

"""

------
swalkergibson
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!

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

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

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

------
awwducks
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!

------
elwell
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!

------
mugenx86
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).

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

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

------
languagehacker
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".

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
tim333
I see Memoir has a fairly rubbish review score on itunes (3.5/5) whereas
Heyday looks good (4.5)

------
momop
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!

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
momop
Awesome! Look forward to it.

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

~~~
blader
Thanks Ryan! Appreciate the support.

------
melvinram
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.

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

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

------
ALee
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?

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

------
robterrell
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?

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

-Yi

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

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

~~~
mugenx86
Security against NSA/espionage really shouldn't be a concern considering
nobody that paranoid would even use this app, let alone pay for it.

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

------
HaloZero
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.

~~~
blader
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!

------
vashishthajogi
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.

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

------
shadesandcolour
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?

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
shadesandcolour
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.

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

------
ktran03
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.

------
jv22222
Fantastic. Great job. Also, well done for sticking to a side project for so
long and releasing it, that's rare.

~~~
blader
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.

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

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

~~~
methehack
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.

~~~
dmazin
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.

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

------
bmelton
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.

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
cesarbs
Any plans to release for Windows Phone?

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

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

------
source99
Why did you build this? I'm curious about your motivation.

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

~~~
blader
Thank you, all credit goes to our amazing team:
[http://www.hey.co/about](http://www.hey.co/about)

------
hipaulshi
I am very impressed.

------
ksaville00
Just saw it got featured on the app store, nice work!

------
xpop2027
Would be sweet to see the stats of the launch!

------
liuhenry
Is there a backup or data download function?

~~~
blader
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.

~~~
colinbartlett
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.

~~~
maebert
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.

~~~
tim333
Export to html would be nice so it could look pretty in my laptop browser.

------
mrdub
Excellent work, super polished app!

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

