Meridian
An offline-first field journal for recording places, notes and photographs — built to be quick in the hand and quiet on the screen.
Meridian began as a notebook problem. On long walks I wanted one place for a sentence, a pin on a map and a photograph — without signal, without accounts, and without an app that asks for attention every time it is opened.
The brief
Make something that opens in under a second, works entirely offline, and never loses an entry. Everything else — sync, sharing, export — could come later, or not at all.
The best field tools disappear in use. You notice them only when they are gone.
Approach
The journal is a small progressive web app. Entries are written to IndexedDB first and to the network never, unless asked. Maps are pre-cached per region, so a valley can be downloaded the night before a walk.
- A single, generous text field, with the place and time filled in silently
- Photographs resized on the device, before they are ever stored
- Export to plain Markdown, one file per day
Outcome
Three hundred entries over a year of use, and no lost notes. The most useful feature turned out to be the smallest: a daily page that shows where you were exactly one year ago.