Inksightful's on the App Store!

I kept handwritten diaries from 1988 until 2005: 17 years, 12 notebooks, 1,853 pages. Memories of so many formative experiences are preserved between those covers – first love, heartbreaks, uprooting my life to move across the country, settling into a career, marriage. But it was too hard to actually find anything written there.

That’s why I wrote Inksightful, an app for people who love paper notebooks but wish old pages were searchable. It scans handwritten pages to build an indexed digital archive. Using it, I now have a copy of all of my diaries on my phone; they are backed up and searchable. Beyond handwriting recognition, Inksightful has features for preserving diaries, such as indexing content by date and by person. If you use an iPhone or iPad, you can use Inksightful, too; the app is now available on the App Store.

One personal consequence of working on this project: I’ve reconnected with paper. While I still have a diary habit, I’ve been writing on my iPad since 2018.¹In Day One, recommended if you don’t want to recommit to paper. Last September, I realized I was starting a momentous year. My youngest son was starting his senior year of high school. I decided I wanted a physical diary as a tangible reminder of life in this final year before we arrived at the “empty nest.” Thus, I started a new morning ritual – first thing in the morning, before the rest of the house wakes up, I fix a double shot of espresso, pet my dog Charlie, and pull out a pen²Tactile Turn, awesome. and my paper notebook³Graystorm Studio, also awesome. and completely ignore computers and the internet for 15-20 minutes while I gather and record whatever’s on my mind. I’ve used Inksightful to scan my new diaries for archive and search, giving me the best benefits of the analog and digital worlds.

Because of Inksightful, I’ve also switched my commonplace book habit to paper. Since 2019, I’ve kept notes about the books I’ve read in my app Library Notes. This past year, that switched to a small paper notebook where I write notes and quotes. I use the current version of Inksightful to scan those pages and recognize my handwriting, and I’m working on new features to help index and organize handwritten commonplace books. If this sounds interesting to you, definitely reach out! I would love to hear more about what you would like to see in a digital companion to your paper commonplace book.

Last year, I wrote:

Perhaps a little-foreseen consequence of the Age of AI is it will make pen & paper newly practical in the digital world. If so, that’s a future I will enjoy.

That’s the future I find myself in! While AI has become a bigger and bigger part of my software job in the past year, AI has also let me slow down and spend more time with paper, ink, and books. If this sounds nice to you, too, check out Inksightful.