Mem is a new note taking app with the tagline “Capture and access information from anywhere”. Using Mem as my daily driver for the past month, it definitely feels optimized for this purpose it to other apps like Roam or Obsidian. First impressions so far are that it’s different and it’s incredibly fast. Below is my experience using it, my main use cases are daily planning and information dumps.
If you are familiar with the concept of tags and making pages from other apps, you can get started very quickly. Mem uses #’s for tags and +’s for pages (also referred to as Mems). But that’s where the similarities end.
How is Mem Different?
Mem foregoes the use of the traditional folder structure approach and instead uses three main views.
Timeline
Inbox
Tasks
Timeline
The timeline provides a chronological view of all files you’ve interacted with, alongside the date and time. If you were after a specific date, there is also a date picker which allows you to hop back to a previous day. One downside is that currently you cannot select future dates to make notes for. This is probably my biggest pain point since there’s also no quick way to reference and then jump to a future day.
One thing that I love about the timeline is how it can provide a quick context of the note by hovering.
Inbox
Mem also has an inbuilt inbox system and it is exactly what it sounds like it. You can treat notes as emails such as snoozing them until a later date or marking as unread. If you collaborate with groups within Mem and someone tags you, it also pops up in your inbox.
Personally, I’ve never been able to maintain an Inbox Zero system. In other apps I will have a mess of tags like #to-reads, #read-later, #inbox that I leave untouched. Unfortunately, this is similar to my email inbox… I’m more of a fan of starring (bookmarking) frequently visited pages in Mem instead of sending them to the inbox.
But if you can achieve it, Mem greets you with a lovely inbox zero confetti animation!
Tasks
Mem has inbuilt tasks checkboxes which you can tick off. It provides a view of when you made the tasks and which note it’s apart of. Similar to inbox, you can also snooze tasks until a later date.
How is Mem Optimized for Capturing and Accessing Information?
By far my favourite feature is the Spotlight feature. To capture anything on your browser or any other app, you can highlight something, press a hotkey, and instantly send it to your Mem database.
Similar to Mac’s inbuilt Spotlight feature, you’re also able to instantly export information from your database to any external source such as a message to a friend or email. This feature works perfectly with text and I was excited to try the same thing with photos. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems to ignore images.
While Mem’s mobile app is still under development you can still quickly capture information on your phone by sending an SMS to Mem via WhatsApp or Telegram. This automatically syncs to your timeline and inbox.
Writing and General User Experience
Mem enters a focus mode once you start typing, fading away the sidebars and automatically creating a new note from anywhere within the app. I found this to be pretty engaging, wanting to dump words onto the page before exiting.
Mem allows you to preview other notes by hovering their titles in most parts of the app. Unfortunately this doesn’t happen in the sidebar. The alternative is to view them by clicking it, and then closing if it’s not what you’re after which returns it to the previous state. I can see this becoming a becoming a pain point once your database becomes more connected.
Although this isn’t an issue for me at the moment, you can’t seem to filter through more than one tag. This makes it it difficult to drill down when your database becomes too large. I would also like to see the ability to import/export notes as it also feels a bit locked in.
Besides these pain points, Mem has been a delight to use to capture/retrieve information. You can tell the creators have put a lot of thought into the user experience, I enjoyed writing in it more than I initially thought. Plus having a long-term vision of J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man isn’t half bad either.
Loving your posts. I couldn't agree with you on this one though. I still can't figure the app out and that's after picking up Obsidian, Craft, Roam and Logseq within a few minutes. And the thing that made me delete it off my computer was the endless popup demanding I let it record my screen.
Noooope.
Looking forward to your next post!