Back in 2016 I decided that I would create a software application that would allow me to create someone’s life story. It would include stories, events, people and a complete range of media including video, audio, images, documents, and social media. It took several years to develop and during that period I gained a lot of experience in knowing how to create a life story. I also realised that the software that I was creating had a much broader range of applications than I had originally intended, so I added anthologies and events to a growing list of products that could be created with the software.

That software started life as a pair of iOS apps that were briefly available on the app store. The first was an iPad-specific application that you could use to create your LifeStories, and the second was a player app for iPad and iPhone that you could use to view LifeStories that someone had created.

The main problem was that the iPad had a lot of limitations as a device for creating LifeStories, so over the course of a year I ported everything across to Mac, so now the creation tool, LifeStories Studio, is a native Mac application. You can see it running on the Macs in the Apple store above.

For biographies, the use of LifeStories Studio as a creation tool was only one part of a larger puzzle. In my blog posts I often refer to the challenge of not only creating a LifeStory, but of persisting it long into the future for future generations to see who you really were. The persistent storage has been absent until now, which is why I have not released LifeStories Studio commercially.

That is set to change with the development of blockchain technology and persistent storage solutions like IPFS. So my current focus is on the integration of the work that I have done with LifeStories Studio with blockchain solutions. You can follow my progress here, or on Twitter where I am @sexadegen.