Tessera Memories

Tessera is a private memory journal for iOS and Mac — a small app for a long practice.

Write freely, file later. Build a library of moments, exact-dated or just the feeling of a year, and let them gather quietly into the shape of a life. No scoring. No streaks. No cheering from the margins. Only the pages you choose to keep, and the slow, honest portrait they become.

— THE CHAPTERS —

THE BLANK PAGE A single tap opens a blank page. No era, no tags, no mood required — just a cursor, waiting. When you're done, the memory drops into your Inbox until you decide where it belongs.

ERAS Eras are the autobiographical chapters only you can name. "Childhood" can hold "Pittsburgh years," which can hold "Before my parents divorced." Each era keeps its own count and a soft mood distribution at a glance. Ongoing eras — the one you're in now — render as "Start – present."

TAGS, MOOD, FLAGS Tags are nested and cross-cutting: family/mom/advice is three linked threads. Mood is a single gentle five-point scale. Two flags, no more: Core Memory for the ones that anchor you, In Progress for the ones you want to return to.

FOUR WAYS TO REMEMBER WHEN Not every memory has a Wednesday attached. Choose exact (March 14, 2024), approximate (circa 2003), era-only (sometime in childhood), or undated — your timeline respects the difference.

PORTRAIT The Portrait tab is the shape of what you've kept: soft statistics, a mood distribution, a heatmap of when you wrote, a word cloud of what comes up, pairs of tags that often appear together. More like an infographic in a literary magazine than a dashboard. When you open it after three months of writing, the feeling is not "progress." The feeling is: huh. There's a shape here.

GENTLE REMINDERS Never. Weekly. A few times a week. Daily. You pick the weekday(s) and the time, or turn reminders off entirely. One reminder a day, at most.

— PRIVATE BY DESIGN —

No accounts. No servers. No analytics. No newsletters. Your memories live in your iCloud private database, opened with your face, your fingerprint, or your passcode.

• Sync — your iCloud, your pace. • Lock — Face ID on by default; timeout the way you prefer, or Never. • Export — every memory to a Markdown folder, whenever you'd like. No questions. • Ownership — your writing is yours. It is never read, indexed, or trained upon.

— QUIETLY BUILT —

Tessera is a single universal app: iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with your library kept in step through iCloud. Text-only in this first version — by choice, not by shortcut.

From Little Lumen Labs.

Each memory a tile. Together, a portrait of you.

Terms of Service: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/