Afterthought
An app built to make journaling feel effortless and familiar.
My role: design, code
A better way to capture your memories
on iPhone.
Get app
An app built to make journaling feel effortless and familiar.
My role: design, code
on iPhone.
Get app
I love the idea of journaling but none of the apps I've tried ever clicked with me. So I decided to make my own. Coming off a multi-year game project, I kept the scope small, aiming to ship within 1-3 months. And since a large part my of motivation was to learn iOS development, I wanted to build it using the most modern Apple tech and design patterns.
with a photo and just bit of text. More is fine too.
out of my posts.
to post regularly by tracking my daily post streaks.
Before I began putting designs together, I brushed up on Apple's design guidelines and broke down tons of screenshots of other apps to get a good understanding of the sizes and spacings to use (in trying to make it the Apple way). I also started poring over the SwiftUI examples and iOS documentation. Coming from C#, Swift was pretty easy to pick up. But then it was time to make the thing.
were made to get to the design that shipped. It was roughed out in Figma, then fine tuned in code as I understood more of what SwiftUI was capable of and sometimes demanded.
prioritizes easy browsing and quick posting. Up top the Daily Post Streak is there to gently motivate you to not miss capturing a memory. The posts are kept bite size and skimmable. And a new post begins with a quick tap at the bottom.
and designed to reduce friction with a clear single sheet of options, and aims to ease expectations of long posts by reducing the ominous blank page to an approachable text box.
or something specific with a simple search.
was (mostly) as simple as tweaking which system colors were mapped where and adding a dark mode accent color to pass accessibility.
Apple’s design guidelines only cover the tip of the SwiftUI iceberg. The rest of the possibilities and limitations must be discovered in development. It really demands a back and forth between design and code to get to a strong user experience that is also practical and stable.
Also, with SwiftUI being relatively young, there are some strangely missing features and plenty of bugs to work around. It can be maddening, but things will no doubt improve with time.
Overall, I really enjoyed the project. Dissecting the design patterns. Learning Swift and the many core technologies that go into a modern iOS app. Constantly solving problems. It was all a lot of fun.
to hear some folks are enjoying it!