balk

a quick-capture journal for your iPhone and iPad: keep your thoughts to yourself

Balk is a native iPhone and iPad app for jotting things down the moment they happen — a thought, a photo, a voice note, where you are — without ceremony. Open it, type, hit post. That's the whole idea.


It's a personal project, not a product: a native companion to a private journal app I already run for myself, built because the web version didn't feel fast enough to actually use in the moment. There's no sign-up, no social feed, no algorithm. It's just yours.


How it works

  • Compose — write a short post, optionally attach up to three photos, record a voice note (transcribed on your device), tag where you were, and label it with one or more tags.
  • Voice posts — hold the balk button, or use the Action button or Control Center, to record a post from anywhere.
  • Feed — everything you've written, newest first, right below the compose box. "On this day" shows what you wrote a week, a month and a year ago.
  • Search & filter — one button opens a command palette: search posts, replies, tags and reactions, or narrow the feed by tag, date, or whether a post has a photo, audio, or a place.
  • Tags & lists — tags can live in folders like work/meetings. Group them into lists, give each list its own order, and lock a list behind Face ID for anything more private.
  • Share & Siri — share photos, links and text into balk from other apps, send a post to a friend who has balk, or ask Siri for a new post or a search.
  • Backups & export — a daily backup goes to your own iCloud Drive (locked lists encrypted), and you can export everything to Markdown whenever you like.
  • Make it yours — pick your colours, font and app icon, edit the compose prompts, and turn on an app lock.
  • Edit & delete — every field on a post can be changed after the fact, or removed entirely.

Your data

Everything you write is stored on your device. If you're signed into iCloud, Balk syncs it to your own private iCloud account so it reaches your other Apple devices — there's no server run by me or anyone else in between. Full details are in the privacy policy.


Background

I've never thought tweeting was a great idea. I'd occasionally get into it with other fans about a game or a player, but mostly I just used Twitter for news, until even that got weird.


What I always did think was great is the capture mechanism — any kind of media, text, photo, voice, video, tagged and timestamped with location and other metadata, all searchable. It's a genuinely good way to get an idea down quickly. I just never liked handing all of that — my thoughts, my ideas, my metadata — to a company that was going to use it to sell ads, especially when most of what I write down was never meant to be public anyway.


So I built Balk to capture things the same way, minus the sending it anywhere part. A balk is what it's called when a pitcher starts a pitch and never actually throws it — which felt right for an app that's meant to hold onto a thought instead of releasing it. It's also, famously, the sound a chicken makes, one of the birds that never got off the ground. So this is the place for the stuff that never hits send — the ideas that never need to take flight.


Try it

Balk is coming to the App Store soon. Until then, it's available through TestFlight, Apple's app-testing platform. If you'd like to try it, get in touch at tommyfox@hey.com and I'll send you an invite.