I used Day One on macOS and iOS for journaling for many years, compiling nearly 2350 entries in the app’s database. It’s a fantastic product with a great interface and feature set, and if someone asked me what I would recommend for journaling Day One would be my suggestion. But I stopped using it in April, 2020.
Day One did a lot of things, but I found many of them didn’t matter to me. I never looked at its map to see where my entries had been made. I rarely uploaded photos or videos because I kept those in a different place (and I took a lot of photos). I had no need to upload audio files, perform transcriptions, or add PDF attachments1, and I didn’t need daily prompts or templates. All I really cared about were the basics—recording date stamped thoughts and being able to search those thoughts—and I already had software to do those things.
I now use a Shortcut on my iPhone to create a journal entry in iA Writer. That Shortcut adds date, location, and weather information to a file like Day One did, and I’m satisfied with iA Writer’s Markdown formatting capabilities and its tagging and search functionality. For those times when I need something more powerful, I’m able to do work with those journal files in DEVONthink via its indexing feature.2
Day One remains a great product, but Shortcuts and iA Writer fit better into my workflow.
I did try using it for meeting notes and uploading attachments for a short while. It was effective to an extent, but when I discovered cross linking in other products Day One became too limiting. ↩︎
iA Writer files are simple text files that are synced via iCloud Drive. Because of that I can view, search, and modify them in any program that can work with text files. Subsequently, I am able to use DEVONthink’s more sophisticated organizational tools simultaneously, and to integrate my journal entries with other notes and resources. ↩︎