Finally, a journal that remembers your people
Ember is a really neat, unique app that I feel is a cross between a journal and a personal CRM. When you write about someone, the entry goes onto their profile, so you can scroll back through every moment you've shared or written about them in order. I've tried a lot of journal apps. I'm an avid pen-and-paper journaler, but paper can't show you the big picture over time. Ember can.
What I love:
- Individual contact profiles. Each profile shows the exact date of the last time we talked. As someone with a neurodivergent brain, that makes it much easier to see who I'm overdue to catch up with, especially with the Nudge tab.
- Custom fields. For example, I track gender, orientation, and relationship status for every contact, plus anniversary if I know it.
- Worlds. They let me sort people into different areas of my life, and I can draw connections between people.
- Cross-device sync. I started on my Mac, but I couldn't log things from the couch or my bed. I bought the annual subscription for iCloud sync, and being able to log on my phone made it worth it. You also get pretty themes!
- No AI. Nothing can read my private entries or generate text from them, which is how a journal app should work. I hope it stays that way, because I'd have to reconsider my support if that changed.
What could use improvement:
- Setup was a bit arduous. I tweaked everything to my liking, spent about a week backlogging interactions and journal entries from major events in my relationships, adding pictures from my photos archive, and also had to learn the UI which is a little counterintuitive sometimes.
- Some features are hard to find. You have to tap the paperclip icon in the upper right corner of the Journal entries tab to show your follow-up entries that are attached to interactions. At first I was confused where all of those disappeared to! Also, additional communication methods from the default options have to be added in settings manually. (I actually submitted a feature request before finding that, then took it down.)
- Entry types are a bit confusing. It took me a while to understand how stories, journal entries, and interaction follow-ups differ. Only stories and journal entries show up in a contact's Together tab, so I sometimes log something twice to get it on both the Together tab and the interactions timeline. This is because the little pdfs or cards you can generate for contacts only really pull from that Together tab, so if I want those visuals I have to add photos in journal or story entries.
- Documentation is a bit sparse. Better manuals and tutorials would help a lot! But I understand the dev works alone and it’s time consuming to create resources.
Wishlist
- Less lag. Stories with many photos can lag to the point it has crashed the app on my Mac.
- Presence ratings. I rarely know how present the other person was, so I leave the star ratings at default. A rating for how I felt about the interaction overall would be more useful. The developer promptly answered my feature request and told me interaction tags were planned, so that we can log our own emotions related to each interaction, which I look forward to!
Summary
The app is built and maintained by one developer who is responsive and clearly passionate about it. I'm surprised Ember doesn't have more users, but I guess I too found it randomly on Reddit serendipitously. So far, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it in just a week. Most features are free, and it's one of the few apps I think is worth paying for nowadays. I recommend it to anyone who likes data, journaling, or keeping up with the people in their life. I even use it for tracking penpal letters!
What I love:
- Individual contact profiles. Each profile shows the exact date of the last time we talked. As someone with a neurodivergent brain, that makes it much easier to see who I'm overdue to catch up with, especially with the Nudge tab.
- Custom fields. For example, I track gender, orientation, and relationship status for every contact, plus anniversary if I know it.
- Worlds. They let me sort people into different areas of my life, and I can draw connections between people.
- Cross-device sync. I started on my Mac, but I couldn't log things from the couch or my bed. I bought the annual subscription for iCloud sync, and being able to log on my phone made it worth it. You also get pretty themes!
- No AI. Nothing can read my private entries or generate text from them, which is how a journal app should work. I hope it stays that way, because I'd have to reconsider my support if that changed.
What could use improvement:
- Setup was a bit arduous. I tweaked everything to my liking, spent about a week backlogging interactions and journal entries from major events in my relationships, adding pictures from my photos archive, and also had to learn the UI which is a little counterintuitive sometimes.
- Some features are hard to find. You have to tap the paperclip icon in the upper right corner of the Journal entries tab to show your follow-up entries that are attached to interactions. At first I was confused where all of those disappeared to! Also, additional communication methods from the default options have to be added in settings manually. (I actually submitted a feature request before finding that, then took it down.)
- Entry types are a bit confusing. It took me a while to understand how stories, journal entries, and interaction follow-ups differ. Only stories and journal entries show up in a contact's Together tab, so I sometimes log something twice to get it on both the Together tab and the interactions timeline. This is because the little pdfs or cards you can generate for contacts only really pull from that Together tab, so if I want those visuals I have to add photos in journal or story entries.
- Documentation is a bit sparse. Better manuals and tutorials would help a lot! But I understand the dev works alone and it’s time consuming to create resources.
Wishlist
- Less lag. Stories with many photos can lag to the point it has crashed the app on my Mac.
- Presence ratings. I rarely know how present the other person was, so I leave the star ratings at default. A rating for how I felt about the interaction overall would be more useful. The developer promptly answered my feature request and told me interaction tags were planned, so that we can log our own emotions related to each interaction, which I look forward to!
Summary
The app is built and maintained by one developer who is responsive and clearly passionate about it. I'm surprised Ember doesn't have more users, but I guess I too found it randomly on Reddit serendipitously. So far, I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it in just a week. Most features are free, and it's one of the few apps I think is worth paying for nowadays. I recommend it to anyone who likes data, journaling, or keeping up with the people in their life. I even use it for tracking penpal letters!
Show more
Hhsingasong
The journal I didn’t know I needed!
Really love that when I write about my day and tag someone, it gets saved to their page on its own, so all our moments end up together. It’s also nice that there’s no account or AI involved which makes it feel like a truly private place to write.
AAlawayy
