Day One is one of the most popular journal/dairy app available on both iOS devices and Macs. Why am I reviewing a dairy app? Because I believe a journal can be helpful for practically everyone, especially students. Besides the more obvious “what happened today” and “remembering these moments” possible entries, it can also be useful for writers to have a place to write poetry or stories. For those that have issues with getting their ideas on paper (like me) they can improve their writing through practice and make the process less painful. Journals can help keep on track with goals by documenting your progress with a project or going back to an entry to remember why you’re doing the project in the first place. These goals can be anywhere from doing better in math to starting your own club. It can be used to write a situation down to figure out what you’re going to do or just to get some ideas out of your head. Journals are something you can “talk to” that doesn’t judge you on how insane your ideas are and doesn’t talk back (which is my personal favorite aspect of a journal). I personally have issues with writing with pen and paper because sometimes even I can’t read my own handwriting and I have issues with spelling. I also just feel more comfortable writing in front of a computer with a keyboard. I came across Day One and found it suited my needs perfectly. Having it on my iPad means I can pair up my keyboard and go to the quietest place at the moment to go write in peace. Now that I’ve attempted to convince you to start a journal (which isn’t just a girl thing I assure you), let’s look at all the features Day One has to offer.....
One of the most important features, since journals are personal things, a pass-code can be set. You don’t have to have one (though I highly suggest you use it) and in the app’s settings you can set it to demand the code immediately even if you just switched to another app and back or after x amount of minutes. This keeps any nosy people from getting where they shouldn’t. Another useful feature is tags. Instead of using different journals or notebooks within the app there are tags. You can have a journal for poetry you’ve written by making a “poetry” tag and another tag for your random thoughts. You can use as many or as little tags as you wish and multiple tags can be attached to each entry. On the “homescreen” you can view entries in a calendar view or separate entries by viewing all entries by tag. Though I have never used #hashtags, they are supported. You can attach pictures but it is unfortunately limited to one per entry. This stinks because I wanted to use this as a photo journal but I had to go find something else. There are also some cool features I would have never thought of such as recording where you were and the weather that day along with the time and date. You can also set a reminder to prompt you to write an entry at a certain time daily, weekly or monthly. These are all configurable in settings. If you want to share an entry, maybe a poem you wrote in your poetry journal for example, there are many options available. You can e-mail the entry, export as a PDF, HTML (for a website), or in Plain Text format. For non-computer nerds, Plain Text is a standard file type and is pretty much universal and readable by most software. I would be shocked if something didn’t accept plain text and because it is so standard you don’t have to worry about not being able to open it in the future.
Overall I enjoy Day One and it is my primary journal. It’s a pleasure to write in with it’s clean interface and reliable performance. I have never had any problems with the app. I haven’t heard of any issues of syncing across devices and actually appears to do this well although I personally don’t have any other devices to sync to. My only gripe is that there can only put one picture per entry but it appears that they are trying to expand this capability. Considering how wonderful it is otherwise I can’t argue much. The iOS versions currently cost $4.99 and the Mac version costs $9.99. It’s well worth the price if you need a journaling app.
Overall I enjoy Day One and it is my primary journal. It’s a pleasure to write in with it’s clean interface and reliable performance. I have never had any problems with the app. I haven’t heard of any issues of syncing across devices and actually appears to do this well although I personally don’t have any other devices to sync to. My only gripe is that there can only put one picture per entry but it appears that they are trying to expand this capability. Considering how wonderful it is otherwise I can’t argue much. The iOS versions currently cost $4.99 and the Mac version costs $9.99. It’s well worth the price if you need a journaling app.