A surface for your thoughts
The four principles behind Cozy
Hey!
How’s everything going?
First off, thanks for joining this newsletter. Like I said when you signed up, I’m not going to flood your inbox. I just want to keep you in the loop on how Cozy is coming along.
I started building the app about a week ago and I’ve gotten further than I expected. Far enough that I rewrote the landing page with real screenshots and a clearer idea of what this thing actually is.
I know what I wrote on the previous landing page sounded aspirational and vague. I owed you something more grounded, so I’ve been working on the app these past few days and can now tell you the four principles Cozy will be built on:
Your words belong to you
This is the file over app idea that Obsidian made popular. Cozy is an interface for your thoughts, not a vault I control.
I don’t want your journal entries sitting on my servers, or anyone else’s, because I know how I’d feel about mine living there.
Plain text files on your own hard drive give you something no proprietary format can: you can move them, back them up to a USB stick, open them in any editor from 1995 onward, or hand them to your favorite LLM and ask it questions (more on that in a later email).
I don’t want to trap you in Cozy. If you ever want to leave, your files walk out with you.
Writing should feel good
Back in 2015 or so, one of the first apps I ever paid for was OmmWriter. It had a focus mode with soft piano in the background and a satisfying click every time you hit a key, like an old typewriter muffled under a blanket.
I’d open it and actually write, which for someone who gets distracted by a fly on the wall is saying something.
OmmWriter shut down a few years later. Cozy’s writing mode is partly a tribute to it. We need more quiet corners on our screens, not fewer.
It adapts to you
People write differently. Some need a blank page; some freeze up in front of one and need a prompt, a photo, a question, anything to push off from. Some want to track habits alongside their entries.
My design choices will obviously shape the feel of the app, but I want to leave enough slack that you can bend Cozy toward how your brain actually works.
That’s the ambition: plain text as the foundation, flexible enough to hold all of that without losing the soul of the thing.
Life is made of moments
I’ve been writing for many years (though not as many as I’d like), and I’ve piled up a lot of entries in that time. Most are the kind of thing you’d skim past: what I ate, who annoyed me, the weather. Some aren’t. The ones that aren’t are worth pulling out and looking at again.
Steve Jobs called it “connecting the dots looking backwards.” I’m calling it Moments.
The shape is still unclear, but the idea is that you mark the important entries and later see them together, without having to look through ten years of entries to find the one where something actually happened.
Small disclaimer: I’m thinking of launching on Mac first. The plan is for Cozy to live on all the main platforms eventually (Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android), but I’m building this alone and I have to start somewhere. If you’re not on Mac, write back and tell me what you’re on. If enough people are waiting on another platform, I’ll rethink the order.
That’s it for now. I’d love it if you hit reply and told me a bit about yourself: what you do, how long you’ve been keeping a journal, what you’re hoping an app like this will do for you. Any early feedback, throw it at me. I’m reading everything.
And if you know someone who’d be into this, forward them the email. Cozy is going to grow by word of mouth or not at all, so every share genuinely helps.
Thanks, and talk soon.
Alberto