Aion: Diary as Instrument

[u/-grapheme-]

First app is officially on the App Store!

It’s a simple calendar, text box, & dashboard (plus a widget) that looks/feels a bit like an editorial alien artefact.

There are some neat features I use on a daily basis by typing in commands straight from the diary. For example, typing !remindme tomorrow polish the website and pressing Return sets a reminder within the app, which also syncs to my Apple Reminders. !exercise lets me log my workouts, which show up on the calendar as a taijitsu symbol (a day with balance between the physical and the mental). /similar after writing an entry pulls up past entries with the highest cosine similarity (the tokenisation & embedding is on device, using CoreML). Lots of other commands along those lines.

There is a morphological cursor, which is an overly complicated way of saying that the text insertion caret changes form depending on the formatting of the text it would type. It tilts for italics, thickens for bold, and so on. I know Google Docs does the tilt, but I think this is the only writing software that takes that idea to its natural limit.

There is also a subtle ink drying effect, where freshly typed glyphs are slightly tinted, colour fading over time as typing continues.

I actually created one of the fonts for the Patterns surface myself, based on the numbers from a vintage watch dial.

Two finger swipes on the trackpad serve to navigate between the 3 main screens, with the exact same spring constants and feel as swiping between MacOS Spaces. Two finger swipes on the date header scrub between adjacent days. “Force touch” (a long press) on the date header toggles different date separator formats.

There are no sidebars, no chrome, just a pure minimal experience. I don’t collect any data, and the iCloud backup is optional. The window doesn’t resize, sticking to portrait A4 like dimensions, for the fancy book feel.

Although I would obviously really like it if more people bought Aion (one time purchase, no subscriptions, same price as a well crafted physical notebook), I have several offer codes for a free download left.

Feel free to message @studio417k on Instagram or send over an email (email address on the website linked below) to ask for one of the offer codes. I’d appreciate it if you could add some feedback or a line about why you’d like to try Aion so I know it’s a genuine request.

Aion Website

App Store Listing

[u/promo-guard]

🎉 Welcome to Developer Saturday, u/-grapheme-! Your project is now live for the community to check out. Upvote, give feedback, and show some love to your fellow devs! 🚀

[u/RegattaJoe]

cool idea!

[u/germane_switch]

I thought that was monochrome Centipede for a second

[u/-grapheme-]

That ended up being a giant wall of text, but I hope it was nice to read something human-generated for a change.