In early 2020 I designed, developed and published a beautifully simple diary app called Chronicle.
Chronicle users capture their daily moods, experiences and thoughts in a minimal digital journal. Diary entries are safely protected by Touch or Face ID, and stored locally on the user's phone.
The idea for Chronicle came about after reading a number of diaries by leading political figures and thinking about how useful they are as historical artefacts. I had also started keeping a diary myself and found it a useful way to reflect.
I found the diary apps available were overly bloated with features, were opaque about their data handling process, and focussed on symbolic indicators of feeling like emojis or scales out of 10 rather than being word-based.
I wanted to develop a simple alternative that would allow users to keep a secure word-based diary on their device. Over a few evenings and weekends I learnt how to build a native application for iPhones.
I designed and developed Chronicle in Swift, using SwiftUI to prototype and build the first version of the app over a few weekends.
I launched the app on the Apple App Store in early 2020. I enjoyed the end-to-end development of Chronicle. It was a perfect side project and a great way to learn about native development.
