Journaling

I heard that Apple is coming out with a new Journaling App.

There’s a lot of power in the idea of passive journaling. I’m already dumping so much of myself into actually meaningful digital activities, why would I not want a daily record of what pictures I took, what movies I watched, what music I listened to, the places I went, what the weather was like there, a summary of who I emailed, my hiking or running stats, whether or not I meditated (I use a digital timer)? All this digital spying, and I am personally getting squat out of it.

But overall my gut feeling is disappointment. I know with Apple it will be too closed, too subject to Apple’s corporate whims, for me to invest myself into it fully.

Case in point. In 2005-ish, Apple’s music platform was close to perfect for my purposes. I could rip my CDs (or buy them DRM-free on eMusic and save them to disk), play them in a nice jukebox, sync them to my iPod. By 2023, it’s a subscription-only streaming platform that I don’t think will even play the mp3s own (my last attempt to try play my own stuff was a complete failure, and I gave up before their latest Apple Music re-launch, which I refuse to even subscribe to to find out).

So the last thing I want to do is put effort into curating my most personal memories and records into something Apple controls and could discontinue or screw up in the future.

I also sort of hate the idea that it’s starting as an iOS app. I want to do my journaling on a computer with a real screen and a keyboard and a mouse.

Truth be told, I’ll probably use it if it does make it easy to log some of those things I mentioned earlier, but I’ll have to be disciplined about saving screenshots.