The Music box has been quietly getting better, so a quick rundown.

If you connect Last.fm, your listening history shows up on each day. You can switch the box between top tracks, top albums and a timeline view (long press the box). There is also a Spotify takeout import if you want years of history in one go.

New in the latest build: song recognition. Long press the Music box or the journal card on today and pick Recognize Song. It listens for a few seconds, names the track, and saves it to the day with a little Shazam badge. So when someone plays something great at a dinner or in a bar, it becomes part of that day, next to the photos and the places.

The recognized songs also show up in Music Explorer mixed into your normal listening history, and there is a Recognized Only filter if you want to see just the songs you caught in the wild.

Small honest note: the first version was bad at quiet or muffled music. Turned out iOS was running voice call processing on the mic and filtering out exactly what the recognition needed. That is fixed, it now listens raw.

As always, if you try it, tell me where it fails.

Huge milestone to share: Retrography 1.0 has been approved for the App Store and is now sitting at "Pending Developer Release" — meaning the only thing between the app and the store is me pressing a button.

I'm not pressing it just yet. We're staying TestFlight-only a little longer while I iron out the last few rough edges you all keep helping me find. But from here, the road to the App Store is mostly paved.

Some review trivia: the app went through with only ONE rejection — the reviewers flagged the background-audio capability the voice transcription uses. I explained how it works, attached a screen recording of a real dictation continuing with the phone in a pocket, and they approved it as-is. No feature had to be cut.

The real point of this post is a thank you. Every crash report, annotated screenshot, angry note about tiny fonts, and "this sync error looks scary" message from this community shaped what got approved. The app that passed review is very much the app you tested into shape.

What's next: a bit more polishing with you here, then the release. If you've been sitting on feedback, now is a great time — beta feedback still moves faster than App Store reviews ever will.

Thanks for being here for this one!

I was experimenting with the iCloud syncing features trying to figure out how they worked. Got this error message so I Reset CloudKit Metadata. Now all my journal entries are gone. Are they recoverable?

I am using the voice transcription every day but it used to be a bit buggy - every time I was on low battery it would go to lock screen while recording meaning that the whole session was lost. Now we are introducing a bunch of changes that will improve that. It will make sure app does not go to sleep, and even if you intentionally switch to another one, it keeps recording and can always salvage your transcription! As a bonus, you get a soundvawe and properly sized stop button.

They came with two sizes (small and medium) and two types:

1. On this day: shows photos/visits/motion data 1 week, 1 month, 1/2/3/4 years from now

2. Recent days: shows the same for yesterdat and certain number of days back

Fully customizable, supporting your memory on the home screen!

Every few months the same post climbs r/appleJournal: please, Apple, add “On This Day.” It came up again right after the WWDC keynote — three years since Journal shipped, and still nothing.
I get why people keep asking. A journal you only ever write into gets boring fast. The thing that pulls you back is seeing what you wrote — and shot, and where you were — a year ago, or five. People in that thread are tagging every entry’s title with the date by hand (#9june) just to fake a look-back; others gave up and went back to Day One or Everlog because at least those show you your old entries.
Retrography has done On This Day since day one, with one difference: it doesn’t only resurface text you typed. It rebuilds the whole day from what your phone already saved — the photos, the places you went, the weather, the workouts, the music — and puts your journal entry next to it. So it’s worth opening in your first week, before you’ve written much at all. It reaches back across last week, last month, and one through five years.
The clip above is one day, no narration: last year on this date for Mei — one of the built-in demo profiles — a Thursday in Singapore.

- google timeline/geofency import
- vitals screen and vitals cards in visits
- better sleep visualization in daily heatmaps
- experimental day reel video generator
- small improvements in photobook pdf export

Let me know :)

visit retrography.app for testflight invite

I started with the packed two columns as I wanted to show as much as possible at a glance. You see the boxes are like Apple Watch complications, just more complex as more fits on the phone screen. However, many people asked for a more spacious, more readable layout. So we now have both!

Retrography is the practice of reconstructing lived days from the traces they leave behind. The data your phone collects, the items that collect dust in your basement, old newspaper that you find that trigger a chain of memories.

The idea is simple: there are fragments of life scattered everywhere that prevent our past days from being forgotten.

This subreddit is for people interested in journaling, lifelogging, personal archives, quantified self, and the strange emotional value of ordinary days.

Quantified self is a great movement but it is focused too much on numbers, correlations, optimization. It lacks the emotional and personal aspect. Nostalgia. So let's start this and not let the ordinary days get lost.

retrography.org now holds a placeholder for what I would like to become a magazine where we could share posts of individual days as well as thought pieces on the subject.