lightbugs: Journal & Diary

Jhon Kenrick Villaces

About this app

lightbugs is a private journal and diary for the small moments of a day: a laugh in the kitchen, the smell of rain, the way someone said your name. Keep them on a page, in a notebook on your own shelf. No account, no feed, no streaks.

Keep a moment
• Write a note, take a photo or a short video, or record a voice note
• Add a song from Apple Music, stickers, checklists, and bold or marked words
• Stuck for words? A question on the page gives you somewhere to start
• Pick the paper, font and colours you write on

Your notebooks
• A style for each notebook: old book, typewriter, letter, studio, mono, autumn, a book full of cats and more
• Turn pages with a real page curl, or fan out a whole day
• Find any day on the calendar and look back at past days

Every day
• Widgets for your home screen
• An evening reminder, only if you want one
• Share a page as an image, or save it to your gallery

Private by design
Your notes, photos, videos and voice recordings are stored on your device — and in your phone’s own backups, if you use them. We do not run accounts, we do not have servers that receive your content, and we do not sell or share your data with anyone. lightbugs goes online for two things: asking the app store whether a newer version is out, and finding and playing songs from Apple Music when you add one to a note. Apple sees the words you search, and the covers and clips of the songs in your notes load from Apple when a page shows or plays them. Nothing else about you or your notes is sent, and without a connection everything else works the same.

Why lightbugs
The light from a firefly takes a billionth of a second to reach your eye. The light from the stars above it has been travelling for thousands of years. Both are real, and only one of them will be gone by morning. Most of a life is made of that smaller kind of light: moments that happen once, in one place, to one person. lightbugs is a place to keep them.

Made by one person. Questions or ideas: [e-mail]

What’s new

what’s new
• a typewriter for your notes: a 1930s portable with real key sounds, a bell and a desk recorder (settings › experimental)
• a new look: one set of icons, a white paper home, a simpler settings
• the cats in a zapurr notebook learned tricks: tap one, or watch them race, leapfrog and chase
• 24-hour time (preferences › 24-hour time)
• every sheet closes with a swipe down
• the calendar starts from your oldest day; the date wheels loop
• books open smoother and sharper
• small fixes