Mémoires 1.0.27 beta released. Future of Mémoires.
October 4, 2007 by Dmitry
New Release
We’ve released a new beta version of Mémoires, our diary app for Mac OS X. Here’s the release notes:
New Features
- Importing from Journler and MacJournal.
- “Entry” menu (and shortcuts).
- Saving of “Check Spelling As You Type” value.
Bug Fixes
- Failed to save document when quitting and clicking “Save”.
- Text editor was losing focus when saving.
- Changes to title were not committed when adding a new entry.
Download it from here, or as usual, use automatic update.
Future of Mémoires
Mémoires is not the only project we do for Mac OS X. Actually, it was born as a side hobby project when making a “bigger” application (not related to journaling at all).
The first beta version of Mémoires had been put on our website at the beginning of August, and we decided to sell it. We even made a page for pre-ordering, but never announced Mémoires (except for to my twitter buddies), because we got back to another project.
Later I though: why not announce Mémoires and let people use this simple application? We’re not going to develop it anymore, so let’s release it for free. And something unexpected happened…
Mémoires had been fireballed and TUAW’ed, got lots of downloads from MacUpdate, VersionTracker, etc., and we received a lot of feedback from users. It seems like people actually need an app like this!
So I stopped writing another project and got back to developing Mémoires to make it even better.
So here we go now, I am fully committed to our journaling application. But we are a tiny software company, we have to make money to support our living, right?
It’s a tough decision, but we’re thinking of making Mémoires a shareware application, which you will be able to purchase for a small fee. This will help us continue developing it. I’ve got a lot of ideas, and you, users, send a lot of interesting feature requests – we don’t want to abandon this little app.
What do you think, guys? Are you OK with this? All we need is your permission.
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That all depends on how much you are going to charge. What myself, and I think most of memoires users like is its minimalism. Its lack of features compared to journler or other journaling apps that have so many features which simply become a distraction to the act of keeping a simple journal. I think the price would have to be low to justify such a minimal app. I also think adding features which would justify a price increase would alienate memoires users. The only features I am looking for are those that somehow COMPEL me to write. Think writing prompts. I think the focus needs to be kept solely on writing and not on multimedia or GTD features. If you can keep it VERY simple and somehow compel a fledgling writing habit I think you would have a great app that users would pay a decent amount for.
Drew, thanks for your comment! I can assure you that we won’t add features to justify the price.
I’m always full of feature ideas. But I’ll think 1000 times before adding them. Actually, when I think what’s better: add another feature, or work on basics and polish the feature we already have, I choose the latter.
The point of Mémoires is simplicity and basics instead of feature bloat, and I want to keep this point forever.
Journaling have two parts: writing and reading. For now, I’m trying to do the writing part better. Later, I’ll improve the reading part.
How about donationware? It has worked pretty well for other companies.
I love Memoires, but I am a self-supported student. I would love to donate to Memoires but I dont know if I could play for every major release :(
I found Mémoires by accident a week ago, and I suspect my usage of it may be slightly different from what you had in mind for it. I’m using it as a daily work log, keeping track of how much time I’ve spent on various projects and what I actually did. I’m working as a freelancer/consultant and I find the minimal Mémoires interface means I’m actually logging this info instead of defering it (usually indefinately!).
I know Mémoires is hardly optimised for this sort of thing, but the speed with which I can jot down some free-form notes as I work means it’s actually working great for me. I also greatly value the saved file just being a plain sqlite3 database which I can query myself with the sqlite3 client should I ever need more than the app offers. I rsync the file every night to my backup drive, and I know that even if Mémoires was to disappear tomorrow I’ve still got my data in an easily-read format.
I’ll happily pay for Mémoires (as I’m using it as a tool for my work) so long as it stays as simple as it is. I have a couple of suggestions, so I guess I’ll head on over to the forum. :-)
Thanks for working on Mémoires and getting it to where it is today. I’m a big believer in the philosophy of small simple tools which do one thing well and keep their data transparent.
I tried Memories but it seemed too lightweight for my needs. I also question why you would want to create a journaling app when there is already a few in the market now. MacJournal has been around forever (and full disclosure, is what I use) and is quite good. Jornler is another shareware software that seems compotent too.
Keep it simple guys.
I still use Macjournal (to which I donated twice), but I’ve started to use Mémoires on account of Macjournal current feature bloat.
Add any features and I’m gone.
Really simple means very cheap. Think $5/$10.
I would consider making Mémoires very minor nagware (registration code to make the nag go away). That means no feature disabling (all features work in both unregistered and registered versions).
Good search is important.
“It seems like people actually need an app like this!”
Right on! I’ve used MacJournal and Journler, both excellent apps, I’m using Memoires.
“What do you think, guys? Are you OK with this? All we need is your permission.”
Yep, your work is sweet. Of course I’d rather keep my cash, but if my cash in your pocket means you continue to make sweet apps, then so be it.
I think you SHOULD give this software a price. It’s just the kind of thing I was looking for. I’d certainly pay up to $15 for this if password protection was built into it.
To be honest, I think you may need a more palatable icon to get much success from Mac users under a shareware system.
Незнаю можно ли здесь писать по русски… но впринципе если в Memoires появится возможность ставит пароль на программу и безопасно хранить некоторые данные то я точно куплю ее… если она будет в район 15-20 долларов
Спасибо за комментарий! В финальном релизе 1.0 паролей не будет (пока work-around такой: http://blog.codingrobots.com/2007/10/01/how-to-make-encrypted-journal-with-memoires/), но эта фича планируется в дальнейших релизах.
Go for it! If you make it shareware, I’ll buy it. I love Mémoires’ simplicity, but password protection is the one feature I’d love to see in it. Keep up the good work.