Memphemera is the first product from Ogma Labs. It’s been under development for quite a while - the day job kept interfering with my plans. Now it’s ready for a v1 release and will be coming to the App Store as soon as we get approval from Apple.

Memphemera started life as an experiment - could I use AI to build a simple, super fast note taking app. Something to capture those fleeting thoughts I have, mostly while walking the dog but also in front of the TV, mowing the lawn, wandering around town. You know - it’s the same for us all.

Originally I thought I just wanted notes but then I started to see more options to support me in my daily needs to capture my mental ephemera. Vault was first - that was basically nuggets but behind FaceID. Different from notes Vault, now nuggets, were intended for little bits of information - not long enough to be a note - but important enough to want to capture and to assign to their own, separate category.

Then it was obvious that lists were missing. I’ll often remember or think of a few related things I want to order, or get done, or tell my wife. Stuff I might want to check off. A list. And if you’re having simple lists well it’d be dumb not to have checklists and todo lists so all of those came next.

At which point I found myself using lists for things that were really collections that demanded a bit more structure than a list. And so collections and simple tagging (for collections only at this point) were born.

Projects came next but really if you want to do a ‘project’ you need something more detailed, more specific than I intended to build. But goals - goals are different. Typically personal and without the strictness of projects goals were an obvious addition.

I’ve always believed things should come in threes, or multiples thereof, so I had a tile looking for a category. I scratched my head for a bit - I wanted something genuinely useful. Journal came and went - that’s another category like projects that is best served by a fully dedicated app. Besides journals are mindful - you sit down to capture a journal entry. Memphemera is designed to help you capture and get back to day to day thoughts and activities that matter that tend to get scattered or lost altogether.

I was cleaning one day and trying to remember - when did I last clean the fridge - when it struck me. Routines! The final category is routines.

And so our data model was complete.

After that my main focus was getting back to and using the information you’ve captured which is why we have Today View which collects all your routine tasks, to do list items and steps from your goals into a single Today View. And for that moment when you just want to get back to something we have All Items View: a searchable, filterable view of every item in your database.

It was important to me to set the right foundation. Memphemera is built on Apple’s Swift Data so it works offline and syncs seamlessly with iCloud. That means your data is available everywhere you go and you can access it from any device: we’ll be releasing a dedicated iPad app soon but today the iPhone does a very decent job on the iPad. A Mac version? Maybe one day. Using iCloud also means Memphemera is totally private. There’s no way I or anyone else can see your data. It’s encrypted at rest - a fancy way of saying it looks like gibberish when you look at it and can only be unscrambled with a special key that is dedicated only to you. Apple manage all of that on your behalf so it’s super safe and super secure.

So that’s Memphemera and how it came to be.