We created ‘Moolight App — Your AI Life Journal Companion’: A Personal World Just for You

Oran: "I've been journaling for years, but it feels like all the content just sits there, and I can't really reflect on it. Why not keep it simple? Install a button on my wall, and I'll press it daily to show my mood."

Legolas: "Sure thing! I can do that." He then found three pedometers in red, yellow, and green, thinking gleefully, "This way, not only can she track her mood, but she can also see how often she felt a certain way."

Oran: "Wow, that's neat! But how would I know which day I recorded my mood?"

Legolas, falling silent: "… The pedometers won't be able to do that. Maybe we should develop an app instead."

One afternoon at the end of May 2022, this conversation took place between Oran and me. Two introverts, an INFP and an INFJ, both of us have a profound love for journaling.

Coincidentally, I'm the author of "The iOS Development Guide for Creators." I spent 8.5 years in Vancouver during my undergraduate years, exploring out of sheer interest and have a cross-disciplinary background in computer science and design. Oran, on the other hand, is a graduate student majoring in Data Science at Tsinghua University. While she has never been exposed to iOS development, she has a genuine passion for extracting valuable insights from data.

A Systematic Methodology

Many might wonder, is a seemingly systematic approach viable? While the logic is clear to most, true understanding comes from practice. So, we began to implement the methodologies from the tutorials. We first created a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and conducted user research.

Around June or July of 2022, we were engaged in the above activities. We discussed the idea with over 100 individuals and found that a significant portion was interested in this concept. Thus, we decided to give the green light to the Moolight project and officially move forward. During this time, Moolight also partnered with like-minded individuals from the fields of art, psychology, and others, strategizing together.

During this period, Oran self-learned iOS development and began implementing the desired features for Moolight.

Pain Points and Design Concept

You might wonder, with so many recording products on the market, why create Moolight? This was, in fact, the first question we faced. We explored for quite a while, and despite the multitude of products out there, we didn't find one that suited our needs. Through user research, we noticed this issue as well. People's journaling habits varied greatly, but many consistently defaulted back to their device's built-in memo or note apps.

The problem with many journaling or mood-tracking apps is their complexity. They might begin by asking a series of questions such as time, weather, location, mood, source of the emotion, etc. Using them feels like filling out a survey. Traditional note-taking apps, on the other hand, usually sort entries by the last edited date, making it easy to jumble up the order when reviewing notes.

Most crucially, a product that can provide analysis from past records simply doesn't exist at this moment. This brings us back to the issue Oran mentioned at the beginning of the article: after recording so much, why let these words gather dust?

With this in mind, we started conceptualizing Moolight, determining what it truly should be.

Pain Point 1: Ample records, but difficult to review.
Pain Point 2: All-knowing AI understands the world, but not me.
Pain Point 3: Discouraged by tedious tags even before starting a diary entry.
Pain Point 4: Uniform products everywhere; where's the unique soul?
List goes on and on….

Rethinking Journaling

Moolight is a product designed from scratch with original thought. Our contemplation began with our understanding of time. From a realistic perspective, life can be imagined as a timeline where we are always in the present. This might be the temporal interpretation of the common phrase "living in the moment."

So, what's history? And what is the future? History might be all past memories and experiences, while the future holds our hopes, aspirations, and fantasies. We can, in fact, seek patterns from history, detect changes in our moods and focuses, and thereby gain insights for our future selves.

Moolight is comprised of three pages: Today, Gallery, and Insights. They respectively focus on the present, the past, and the future time dimensions.
Moolight is dedicated to creating your own little world - a world that's uniquely yours, constantly grounded in the present, reflecting on the past, and looking forward to the future.

Life consists of countless discontinuous moments. In each moment, you experience distinct emotions and thoughts - like the joy of seeing delicious food, interacting with colleagues, or being on a trip. To prevent past moments from influencing the present, every time you open Moolight, you are greeted by a blank slate, ready for you to effortlessly jot down your thoughts. Ideas are fleeting and precious, and we're easily distracted. Moolight aims to minimize the loss of these thoughts.

Entry-based recording is the norm: one entry, one image, per moment. With this structure, you can quickly log a particular instant. Within the Gallery, AI will automatically generate daily headlines for you, aiding in swiftly navigating to a specific memory. Based on historical analysis, the "Insights" page provides a richer, multidimensional perspective, aiming to inspire future-oriented thinking.

Our personal information is a critical aspect of our privacy. How can we protect it while also catering to individualized needs and providing feedback? We've designed a triad of AI systems: "Local AI, Personalized AI, and Large Language AI" to empower Moolight with intelligence, forming its cognitive ability and AI framework.

Whether it's the automatically detected and deeply understood emotional trends rooted in various emotional sources, monitoring shifts in personal interests over different time spans, examining the vast sea of words related to each focus point, or rapidly sifting through all past experiences and directly inquiring from the metaphorical "crystal ball", Moolight can offer insights and feedback.

We truly hope that the world within Moolight is unique in the universe - a private realm exclusively yours. This place safeguards your memories and experiences, while simultaneously bestowing them with value, offering invaluable insights for introspection.

Moolight can documenting photo stories, analyzing the continuum of time, and auto-compiling monthly digests, to name but a few.

Life is incredibly rich and varied, and your experience within Moolight reflects that. Moolight offers several features designed to help you revisit and relive your memories. For instance, you can browse through your photos, relishing the stories they tell. Curious about what happened in a particular month? No problem! The app's monthly digest gives you a quick recap.

This article only scratches the surface of the innovative concepts behind Moolight. There are many more surprises waiting for you to discover. We don't want to give away too much here, especially when so many radiant Moolight users have shared their delightful experiences and memories with us. We're eager to share these touching stories with you too.

Shining Moolight Users

Developing Moolight has truly been a joyous journey. Our happiness doesn't just stem from our genuine love for the product and our passion for the project but is also fuelled by the endearing users who cherish Moolight and have actively contributed to its growth.

JZ was the first to discover Moolight and shared it with his app-loving friends, bringing in our initial user base. Mr. Hammer used Moolight to chronicle his profound reflections on life, touching the hearts of tens of thousands with his words.

Some users have utilized Moolight's 'Word Ocean' feature to analyze their grad school life, while others have used the 'Crystal Ball' tool to delve into their MBTI personality types. Another user even documented their hike up the Mountain, capturing their thoughts and whereabouts at different moments.

The love and warmth we've received from our community of wonderful users is overwhelming. Some of you have mentioned that Moolight is like a beam of light, illuminating the recesses of your heart. Your love and support, in return, have been the guiding light for Moolight. We're truly grateful and feel fortunate to have connected with all of you through Moolight.

We've also had the pleasure of connecting with brand designers and authors like George. He expressed his professional appreciation for Moolight's presentation style. He also shared that he's always been searching for a way to capture the fragments of life and lamented how many of his records have been lost to time. He's particularly fond of the approach that Moolight is taking.
The passion from our community caught the attention of Apple's editorial team. After its launch, Moolight received several accolades including being featured in the Weekly Editor's Picks, App of the Month, and topic collections. Seeing Moolight alongside other apps we truly admire, like Bear, is genuinely exhilarating.

Closing Remarks

Moolight is our collective endeavor, a shared vision with our vibrant user community, towards our ideal life-recording product. Our journey began on June 1st, 2022, with the project's inception. By January 1st, 2023, we had launched on the App Store. By February, Apple had selected us as the App of the Month.

Our quest for passion continues. We still dwell in original thoughts, refining our product with each iteration, always on the move. Our hope is to carve a viable path forward, quietly wishing that Moolight - your intimate world entrusted with the mission of being an AI life-recording companion - gets recognized and appreciated by this wonderful world.

This article documents the endeavors of idealists, original thinkers, and those passionately seeking. It also embodies the methodologies, capturing various phases of the Moolight project from ideation, design, MVP development, product research, pain-point analysis, product development, philosophical contemplation, user interviews, to operational explorations.

As written in our guides, I still believe that pursuing one's passion in this era is feasible. May these recorded experiences encourage you to ground your unique perspectives and dreams, making the world a better place through your efforts.
We are long-term visionaries, and this article marks only the beginning. Looking ahead, we hope Moolight continues to journey alongside you, shining ever so brightly✨.

We'd love to invite you to join the Moolight journey.
Try it out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/moolight-smart-diary/id1631169735

Would love to hear your thoughts❤️
Discord: https://discord.gg/uNUUWAsmeH)