ZenJournal

😱 It's happening, ZenJournal featured in 85! App Stores, in Today tab never the less... Unbelievable.... was just casually browsing @AppFollowIO and found this💥. One week after this: @indiehacker indiehackers.com/product/zenjou…

@lemonsqueezy The fastest way to dump your thoughts to an external memory with no fuss. No title, no reminder, no accounts, just open and type. thezenjournal.com

Pitch your startup in 5 words or less (and include a link if you've actually shipped it 😉)

Recreated @thezenjournal app interface on its landing page, why creating a video when you can show the real thing? #buildinpublic

@buildinpublic The curse of an indie dev. A journaling app.

What are you working on this week?

@Hanncu8 @randomor Subscribe to ZenJournal.substack.com is the easiest way to keep track. Thanks for the support. 🙏

@randomor @thezenjournal Could you help me send out the invitation code?

The biggest update to @thezenjournal yet, testflight soon, working on the landing page today.

Been play testing with our new multi timeline feature, it’s one-of-a-kind: flexible, atomic, logical. TestFlight soon.

Thinking hard about removing the top right gear button. Like why does it need to be there when I only tap it once maybe few weeks. Two options: 1. Folding it to the timeline selector 2. Hide it when typing or scrolling down

@randomor The app lives!

Oops I’ve rewritten with UIKit again. Lazyvstack just too slow. In the end it was not SwiftUI that made this possible, it’s codex…. Coming to @thezenjournal TF soon.

I declare this as the best keyboard for @daylightco and @thezenjournal…. I can finally fire with all ten fingers. Perfect for my new vibe coding setup as well…

@op7418 @retire20022 其实你们不用那么费劲用word 或者上传到一个云端服务器，直接用一个纯本地的小应用不是更少安全隐患吗？ 也不用搜索查找，直接扣？开搜不香吗？ 更不用直面那么多繁琐的按钮，打开就记 只可惜我也不敢推荐自己这个app，因为有一年多没更新了，但是…今年前两个月一定会给大家一个交代

看到马伯庸分享他写日记的方式，非常有意思！ 而且跟之前分享过的 Karpathy 的记录方式也很像。 这种方式可以跟AI很好地结合，我 26 年想实践一下了。 先介绍一下他俩是怎么记录的： 他为了降低摩擦，会只记录事实（就是流水账），而不记录观点，不写感悟，不去润色，也不在乎遣词造句。 Karpathy 当时的日记也是一样采用 Append-only 模式，想到什么就往文档顶部丢，不打标签，不分类，不设层级，日记当剪切板用。 只记事实，就失去了“表演给别人看”或“自我感动”的空间，整个输入的摩擦力就大幅降低了。 而且它还可以通过语音输入，每次记完什么事，只要打开语音输入说一句话就解决了，非常方便。 而且他们还有一个特点，就是只用一个文件去记录： Andrej Karpathy 是在备忘录里，只有一个文档 马伯庸也是，就是只有一个 Word 文档 这样的话对他们来说不用整理，需要的时候直接 Command + F 查找关键字就行。 而且这种流水账的内容比较少，即使记一年也可能只有几万字，随便怎么样都能检索到对应的信息。 马伯庸主要是用这种方式来解决自己中年记忆力衰退的问题。Andrej Karpathy 将其视为大脑 RAM 的释放工具：通过手记，大脑就可以放下这些信息，从而专注于做其他需要专注的事情。 我发现他们这种记录方式跟 AI 协作也非常友好： 这种东西是非常好的 AI 原生语料。 因为它拥有高密度的语义，包括：人名、书名、事件、命令、代码，这些都是非常容易提取的结构化信息。 另外，这种方式对上下文非常友好。 因为它体积小，一年可能最多也就几万字，完美地适配了现在大语言模型的上下文。而且由于它是纯文本，AI 可以非常高效且便捷地进行查询和整理。 这种低摩擦、高信息密度，且纯文本的记录方式，无意中非常适合现在的 AI。 通过这种方式，可以快速构建起属于你自己的类似 ChatGPT 的 AI 记忆。 而且纯文本又不至于让你被绑定到某一个产品上。

@frankdilo Wow I guess I did create an app for that…. @thezenjournal All texts, auto timestamp, things float up as you add new, search for hashtag by prepending “?”, pull up for a heatmap…. Maybe time to refresh it.

Annual holiday ritual: attempting to rewrite @thezenjournal in the latest SwiftUI, then abandoning it again. v5 features @tuistdev and @pointfreeco's SqliteData.

This is enough to get yourself perm banned from r/digitaljournaling. 😂

This is why logging your mood by emojis, as direct as it may seem, is not an effective way to activate the same neurons.

A realistic way to time travel: Journaling is the act of persisting your transient short-term memory and emotions by stamping them onto an external medium, so you can activate the same neurons again in the future.

@adedokun__ Sorry about that. Hope you still find it useful.

@randomor @KTmBoyle @thezenjournal Cool. Yeah, I'm on android.

The people who are good at posting have an extremely rich inner monologue. Most people don’t and that’s okay. But if you don’t have one and you see how much some people post, you think people are spending a ton of time thinking of things to say when really, it’s just a fleeting moment in their mind.

This sounds very much similar to how I use @thezenjournal which is append only. Except it’s chronological and not reverse chronological and it can’t be updated at all, so less as a short term memory that’s constantly reorganized at the top and more as a long term searchable log. This mode of stack based logging also reminded me of how Sam Altman describes his paper note taking process. Thanks for sharing!

Happy 2025! I wrote about “Why journal?” thezenjournal.com/posts/why-jour…