This moment, unmixed

A first article, and one comment

On October 2, a German iPhone news site wrote about MEMOROLL. It was the first article about the app anywhere, published the day after I sent them a short note. They had read it closely: the cursor already waiting when the app opens, the day that changes at 4 a.m., a day's notes joined on the map by a numbered line.

A few comments followed. One said, in effect: I don't see the advantage over Apple Notes.

It was a fair question. The headline was about quick notes, and if speed is all you compare, the Notes app that comes with every iPhone can get close with a little setup. So what is different about MEMOROLL? I felt I needed an answer in my own words.

Two starting points

MEMOROLL has two starting points.

One is a line I have tried to live by for a long time: don't repeat your days. When each note keeps its time and place, and you scroll back through them like a timeline, days you had filed away as "the same as always" turn out not to have been the same at all.

The other is: don't let an idea slip away. Thoughts that arrive suddenly leave fastest, so I went to great lengths to make the app ready the moment it opens.

For a long time I thought of these as two separate things: a way of looking back, and a way of starting fast. Even when I introduced the app, I listed them side by side.

While I was thinking about that comment, I realized they say the same thing.

Not letting an idea slip away means catching this moment. Not repeating your days means the moments you caught stay in your days, so each day can be seen as a different day. Catching, and keeping. Both are ways of taking care of this moment.

The self in this moment

Why this moment?

In the moment something comes to mind, nothing has been mixed in yet. How it will look, which words are right, who it is for: none of that has started. You are simply there, as you are.

As time passes, we add to it, a little at a time. A reason, an explanation, a better shape. For writing meant for others, that is necessary. But each thing we add takes us a step further from where we started.

I think the self in this moment is the unmixed self, the one you really are.

♮

MEMOROLL's icon is ♮, the natural sign from written music. It returns a note that has been raised by a sharp or lowered by a flat to its natural pitch. It is also the mark of my company, RESONANCE.

When I remembered that, the icon made sense to me in a way it hadn't before. What I wanted MEMOROLL to do, I think, was to keep that self at its natural pitch.

Seen that way, the design decisions line up.

The app opens ready to write, to catch the words before thinking begins. There are no titles and no folders, so a note stays in the shape it arrived in. There is no sync, no account, and only one reader, so no one else's eyes are mixed in. It looks like a social timeline but has no followers and no likes, so you never become the version of yourself that performs. Time and place are kept without asking, so you can later remember when and where that moment was.

It is an app defined less by what it adds than by what it keeps out.

The difference from Apple Notes

So my answer to that comment is probably this.

Apple Notes is a very well-made place to keep information. MEMOROLL is a place to keep the self in this moment, unmixed.

Neither is better. They do different jobs.

Looking back, you are there

When I scroll back through MEMOROLL, I sometimes meet myself from a little while ago. A line about the light at the harbor. What I had for lunch. A thought that came at midnight and was left as it was. None of it is tidy, and none of it is meant for anyone else.

But I am there, at that moment on that day. Unadorned, at my natural pitch.

One day. One person. One story.

MEMOROLL is free on the App Store, in English, Japanese, German, French, Spanish and Korean. Made by one developer on Amami Oshima. — https://resdev.jp/en/app/memoroll/