Memoires: the Diary

Summary

Today’s topic is as old as time: love.

Make-up, fashion, hair styles—all of this becomes completely irrelevant in comparison to the desire to be loved unconditionally. To experience a love so strong it makes your heart skip beats. A love which will make you forget everything else.
But what could be better than writing your own story, the fairytale of your every day life?

Memoires: your personal diary. will allow you to do just that so get cracking today!
 

Size
1.455.972 Bytes
SDK-Version:
as of 1.6
Language:
English

Memoires: your personal diary.—the app’s name says it all.
Diary entries are display on the homescreen according to time and date. You can make corrections to previous entries if necessary. There’s even an option to include the location where you wrote a certain entry, via GPS of course. The app uses Google Maps for this function. You can also insert the location manually by inserting a place on the map simply by clicking on it.

In order to write a new entry click on New in the menu bar at the top of the screen. You have the option if inserting photos that have already been saved to your Android phone, or else of taking new ones using this app and then adding them to an entry.

Choose from countless smileys to find a cute way to dot the i’s to completing the mood of your entry. This allows you to keep track of your emotions in the Thought flows (more details below).

You can also tag each entry: one word that you associate with whatever topic you are writing about.
You can follow every entry, which means that you can keep adding new thoughts to a given topic, which is how the so-called flow of thoughts is created.
These flows can be saved under captions and can also be accessed from the app’s general view (there’s a category for it in the menu).
The Follow option can be selected via the downwards pointing arrow at the end of each entry. You can only create a caption for a topic (e.g. Love) after you’ve written more than one entry thus creating a flow. This function also allows you to show/change/share/delete a thought.

You can share your thoughts via Bluetooth, Facebook, Mail, etc., provided that you have an account with one of the above, of course.

The filter function which you can find in the menu lets you search for and display specific texts, either according to tags, locations, or dates (from-till).

Settings:
Security is no doubt the most important function. The app is protected by a password which you must choose and you have to enter this password every time you start the app as well as when you get “Logout timeout” (which you can regulate from “never” till one hour). This way you can share that your inner most thoughts actually remain your inner most thoughts. If you don’t want a password you can simply leave the field blank.

Choose one of the four motives as your layout to personalize the app.

Further settings regarding camera, location search/GPS, tags synchronization, etc. are possible.

All data can be saved to your SD card as an RTF file or exported to Google Docs (although the latter option only allows you to export text—no images). You can also synchronize your entries with your Google account.

I was surprised by the Feedback option: it allows you to send error reports or feedback directly to the developer using Bluetooth, Facebook, Friend Stream, Google Mail, Mail or Peep. I find that the only option that makes sense is the Mail once, as the only contact information listed by the developer is his email address.

Bottom line:
I especially like the flow of thoughts function. This allows you to organize diary entries according to topics as well as the dates you wrote them on. And the cool thing is that you can watch as you develop opinions or associations regarding a topic.

This is what I wrote in my app today, regarding the topic of love:
Even if a lot of us don’t want to admit it, or have given up hope: we’re all searching for love. Sometimes it can seem like it will take more than one lifetime to find unconditional love but unyielding hope spurs us on. Hope is what gives us strength and determination. Hope is what lets you rise up after you’ve been knocked down once again. Is it all an illusion? Are we completely detached from reality and should we finally admit to ourselves that such a perfect love will never be?
I’ve asked myself these questions over and over again, and I myself have experienced these hardships. But you should never give up hope, no matter how often and how badly you’ve been disappointed. That’s what I’ve learned. Even if most men don’t fit the perfect dream mould you can stay true to yourself by believing in yourself and in your dreams. And I think there’s some truth to people saying that these are the best conditions for actually finding happiness, even if it won’t be as perfect as what we see in Hollywood films.

The notion of something being “perfect” is relative anyway… Maybe you’ll write your own every day fairytale sometime.
 

I already mentioned that there are four motives to choose from:

• Classic
• Sense
• Rosa
• Ocean

Okay, Pink is, well, you guessed it—pink. Ocean is blue and the two last ones are pretty similar. It’s up to you to pick the one you like best.

The entries are shown in a clear, easily understandable way. The date, time, and place are always shown at the top of every entry. Seeing as you can use the filter option to find specific texts you can control how organized (or unorganized) your app will appear.

Controls shouldn’t be an issue for anyone. Every category is structured in a way that makes it easy to navigate the app.

The Follow function which allows you to create flows of thoughts is only accessible from the overview (using the arrow that points downwards), but not when you’re viewing an actual entry.

Bottom line:
If I was the type of person who kept a diary I would seriously consider using Memoires: your personal diary. as a support for my "real” diary. If you want to create really long entries a computer keyboard or old fashioned pen is still the way to go. That being said, keep in mind that you’re more likely to have your phone on hand when you’re on the go but feel the need to jot down an idea. Your thought may have vanished into thin air by the time you fish a sheet of paper or your laptop out of your bag.

But not only diary-writers can benefit from this app; I bet all of us have thoughts that we’d like to hold on to. There’s nothing quite like reading through something you’ve written yourself and remembering funny, happy times.
 

I had no problems with Memoires: your personal diary. during the testing phase. Uploading photos works really well and only takes a few seconds.
The same can’t be said for the manual selection of a location, however. I found this to be too time consuming as the map takes ages to load, and it also takes ages to find a country, then a street… But this is more Google Maps’ fault than the apps, so I’m only taking minimal marks off for that.
 

Memoires: your personal diary. can be dowloaded for free from the Market.