I’ve been journalling on Day One since February 2013. When I heard about Apple’s Journal I wasn’t impressed because of lack of export features and the lack of macOS support. I write long text and don’t want to bother with a virtual keyboard. But I’m beginning to think that the whole point of the app is not to write some memoirs but simply to help remembering. In my opinion that’s why the app lacks search and export features. Because it’s not meant to be searched in or shared. It is not a note taking app. It is meant to act on your brain.
In my almost 11 years of journalling, I’ve never searched or shared anything, and I couldn’t tell what I wrote last week. But very, very often I remember feeling something and writing about it years later. And this is exactly when the whole process becomes useful, when you can rely on how you analyzed a situation rather than feel the discomfort of it.
Been using Day One since February 2013. In the beginning there was a single Journal where you could put a single Picture and start writing in Markdown. They changed their economic strategy to subscription, added multiple journal, multiple pictures… videos, audio etc. removed markdown features I was using a lot (like footnotes) and the ability to see the markup for easy editing. They’re basically EverNote now. They completely lost their original idea and what made Day One such a great journalling app. I wish I could easily switch to another one. I did it once with a more agnostic markdown note-taking app (iA Writer) but ultimately came back to Day One. I even developed one of my own as a PWA…
Day One is a totally different thing now. We don’t need another full-featured note-taking app. We need something different and simpler.
SN: I’m also a GTD enthusiast who spent tons of money in apps like OmniFocus or Things or Agenda. I ditched everything to rely only on Reminders and Notes and have never been more efficient.
Hm. I haven’t used Journal app myself yet so not sure how good it is though, I remember DayOne being so amazing except for its subscription based business model, as you mentioned. Actually, I’ve been using Obsidian as my journaling tool instead since I lost all my data on DayOne, but I kinda feel bad for DayOne developers because Apple bought DarkSky for their weather app, why don’t they do the same to DayOne?
Can’t believe this has to be explained, but a Journal is almost by definition something that you want to keep forever. Do you want to lock yourself into Apple devices forever? Have you ever heard of Nokia?
I can’t believe I have to explain this but Apple’s strength comes from their ecosystem. From smart home devices to appliances, to copy paste between devices, storing files in iCloud, air drop, and much much more.
There are a plethora of journal apps that will likely do what you want. Moreover, now. After all Apple has done to build and advance their ecosystem, now. A journal app. That’s the deal breaker?
But what I saw of it made me use it more than my dedicated journal app that has more features that I want. Now that they updated for the SDK let me see how they are doing over the next couple of weeks.
Yes, because the entry is almost already done for you. You just write what you feel about it. No curating tour pictures etc.
The entry isn’t exactly like how I would want it but it isms close and it would have things in there like the location which I always set in my diaro entry and what it choose to be the best pictures.
It also adds suggestions that I normally wouldn’t write about like my walk or jog, but then because it is already compiled I just jot something down quickly.
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