Yap, a home for your video logs

Yap is a desktop app that helps you record and browse your video logs.

Think of Yap as the camera that Jake Sully uses in the first Avatar:

Remember Avatar? Jake is recruited for an expedition in the mineral-rich planet of Pandora. He and other scientists are required to document their days in the planet with short videos, explaining "what they see, what they feel".

Yap is the software they could've used (minus the sci-fi UI on the screen).

I've been journaling on and off since my teens. A couple years ago, I started using video instead of writing on paper. I would open Photo Booth and record myself talking about whatever was on my mind. Sometimes it was "here's what I did today". Other times it would be deeply personal things.

Vlogging is therapeutic like journaling, but much more efficient. The bandwidth of speech is much higher than that of pen and paper. So I can say what I want to say faster and then get back to my life.

That makes vlogging an easier habit to keep too, because I don't have to set aside time in my schedule to do it. I just need five minutes here and there.

It also feels more genuine. I commit things to video that I wouldn't necessarily journal about, because as I speak, I don't have time to filter them out. Writing gives you time to cringe at the thoughts you're having.

Writing also takes up mental brain power to consider how to compose a sentence, where to put a comma... But talking lets you blurt things out. For someone like me, that's a positive thing. [#1]

So I built Yap to make it easier to vlog.

I started vlogging in 2024 using Photo Booth, which comes with macOS. But Photo Booth would crash on me 20% of the time and spit out a corrupted video. (It's very very annoying to talk for 20 minutes and then realize you lost the entry.)

So I switched to QuickTime. It makes it easy to record my screen, which is great when I want to show what I'm working on. QuickTime doesn't crash but it frequently interrupts my recordings halfway through.

QuickTime also outputs large MOV files which are a pain to store. Talking for 15 minutes can rack up a gigabyte. So I started converting entries to MP4 using ffmpeg, and storing everything on Google Drive.

I repeated this process for about a year. The moving, converting, uploading... it's a pain in the ass. I did it 200 times until I had a free weekend and decided to build Yap to house this whole process.

Yap runs without crashing and outputs reasonable MP4 files. It also transcribes and summarizes your vlogs for you. Yap lets you name them and easily find them later. That's all the pitch for now.

Download Yap on GitHub at https://github.com/felipap/yap

Notes

Perhaps vlogging is just a great excuse to talk to one self aloud. If that's true, then I highly recommend it. But if you're not recording yourself, avoid talking to yourself in front of other people; they might look at you weird.