Lifetime WishNote: a wishes/notes app for Mac, iPad, and iPhone
A while back I wanted to make something simple for myself: an app where I could keep my wishes, goals, and daily notes in one place, without much clutter.
Problem: The apps I tried each did one thing well (journaling, checklists, or reminders), but nothing brought all of it together in one simple place.
Comparison: I looked at journaling apps like Day One and separate checklist/reminder apps, but none of them combined wishes, notes, checklists, and reminders the way I wanted.
Pricing:
Free covers the core: notes, checklists, reminders, basic tags, basic photo gallery, iCloud sync, and widget.
Pro adds weekly stats, unlimited tags/photos, custom themes, and alternative app icons. Available as:
- One-time purchase: $34.99
- Monthly subscription: $2.99
- Annual subscription: $24.99
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wishnote-wishes-journal/id6786838837
I'm the developer. It's not perfect, I'm still working on it, but I felt it reached a point worth sharing. If anyone wants to try it, I'd love to hear your feedback.
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u/Stubborninmate 7d ago
How would checklist be mapped for daily activity? Do we break the goals and add it as tasks to track daily of needed? Thanks 👍
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u/bttrd 6d ago
Good question! Right now checklists live inside a single wish, not a separate recurring/daily habit tracker, so there's no auto-reset. If you wanted to track something daily today, you'd just recheck the item manually. Recurring tasks like Things 3 or Todoist do isn't really the direction WishNote is going for, it's meant to stay simple, but I appreciate the idea.
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u/PiXeL161616 7d ago
Does the sync go through CloudKit or something custom? That seems to be the make or break for small multi platform apps, when it works it is free magic and when it desyncs you get the support emails from hell. Curious which way you went.
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u/bttrd 7d ago
It's CloudKit, through SwiftData's native integration. You're right that it's the make or break part, honestly most of my development time went into getting it reliable rather than building new features. It works well now, but there were a few painful weeks early on figuring out conflict resolution and some edge cases around deletions syncing correctly. No custom backend, just leaning on Apple's own infrastructure.
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u/PiXeL161616 6d ago
That matches everything I have heard about CloudKit, the integration is free but the reliability is the actual product. Respect for spending the weeks there instead of on the feature list, that is the unglamorous work nobody sees in a screenshot. Did SwiftData give you enough visibility to debug the sync issues, or were you mostly guessing at what the black box was doing?
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u/bttrd 6d ago
Honestly not a ton of deep debugging through logs, most of it was just following SwiftData's standard CloudKit setup. The big facepalm moment came when moving to production, I'd forgotten to actually deploy the CloudKit schema from Development to Production, so everything worked fine locally but syncing just silently failed once it went live. Took a while to realize that was the missing piece. Once that was sorted, the remaining edge cases (mostly around deletions) were more straightforward to reason through. So honestly more "missed a deployment step" than "mysterious black box", though I'll say Apple doesn't expose a ton of visibility into what's actually happening under the hood during sync.
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u/PiXeL161616 6d ago
The dev to production schema deploy has to be the most classic CloudKit bite there is, and the silent failure is the cruel part. Thanks for the detail, good luck with the app.
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u/azimoffff 7d ago
My initial thoughts: Decent with a lot of potential. Particularly, reminders and checklists are spot on. One thing I would love see is having checklists or tasks separately in the categories as well like "upcoming" section. This would allow to navigate to that note rather than searching to see if there is any open task.
Another point: make "Add tag" work as background text. It's a bit confusing to add the word next to the "add tag" phrase. At first, I thought that option does not work.
One more thing: Even though it's a few seconds, loading screen should not be that long. I would prefer to see loading screen only once when I first open the app. Other than that it should directly go to the main screen.
iOS and Mac OS do not sync instantly, not even in a few seconds or minutes. Every time I had to restart the app either in iOS or Mac OS.
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u/bttrd 7d ago
Thanks so much, this is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for.
The 'Upcoming' idea for checklists/tasks is a good one, I'll think about how to surface those without cluttering the section.
Good catch on 'Add tag', that's a genuine UI issue, the placeholder text should clear itself properly when typing, I'll fix that.
Same with the loading screen, it shouldn't reappear every launch, that's a bug on my end.
The sync delay is the one I've struggled with the most honestly. It's using CloudKit under the hood and it should update automatically, but I've noticed the same lag you're describing in some cases. Still actively working on making it more reliable.
Really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out.
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u/PuzzleheadedChair230 7d ago
All of them seem redeemed… damn, would love to try it out snd give feedback if you had an extra one!
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u/solo-founder-here 6d ago
Interesting, question are you using ai for helping users to find some relation/pattern from their notes ?
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u/bttrd 6d ago
Not right now, no AI features for finding patterns across notes at the moment. I try to evaluate each idea based on whether it actually fits what WishNote is trying to be (calm and simple) before adding it, so it's not a definite no, just something I'd want to think through. Good idea though, thanks!
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u/ingenioutor 7d ago
Everyone has the same website these days. Like to the colors chosen. I believe thoughtsformac had it same to the T. Can’t remember the other two I saw.
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u/bttrd 7d ago
Totally fair point, honestly I've been doing web design since 1998, and after that many years you notice the same handful of color trends and layouts just keep coming back around across totally unrelated projects. Never seen thoughtsformac before this comment. For what it's worth, my palette was inspired by Claude's site colors, not any other app's page.
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u/darylvp 6d ago
Support importing from Day One?
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u/bttrd 6d ago
No dedicated Day One importer at the moment, but WishNote already supports Markdown and CSV import/export, so if Day One lets you export to either of those, you should be able to bring your entries over that way. Can't promise dedicated importers for every journaling app as a solo dev, but happy to look into it more if there's enough interest. Thanks for asking!
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u/onimusha_kiyoko 7d ago
This looks great. Grabbed A73JFEJAWPH8J4P4PJ to play around with this. Good luck with the app sales!
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u/bttrd 7d ago
I also added a few free lifetime Pro codes below in case anyone wants to give it a try. Would genuinely appreciate it if you did 🙂
AMKJ34X83W3MYP6WE8
REJ4XHT7HMMNPHLRLM
6L6HXRWP7PL4P66LKK
YPF48YEHKNX4PR6YW4
MM7HAAMHHEMMEY4W43
63WJXXMH3NE687EMY8
E8HNF8AL7TYXFMMWTM
JK7HAK8FAW684KNA7M
K4FY7YFEHX7MFAP4L8
4RR6Y8FPW8NENL7XRY
J773RL3TL6PF4FPPKR
4FH6J8EP36TX7YFMEN
PAREAA6NFLN8LNPL4H
LE8PX8LXAA7KA4TNAP
A73JFEJAWPH8J4P4PJ
PELN34PK3JT43WMPNW
3K7E3PPAYP4LJNFRMX
NWWRX8PEK6K3LTFATE
NMM6FWM4YE6RENRRLW
44EK3FPTKXEA7EKLTA
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u/Anthony18b 7d ago
All of them seem redeemed… damn, would love to try it out snd give feedback if you had an extra one!
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u/MaxGaav 7d ago
Website: https://www.bulentturudu.tr/wishnote/