I’ve been a long-time user of Day One – it was one of the first Mac App Store apps I purchased – and still love the app. The development team has always done a top-notch job with its design and user experience.
Unfortunately, the latest updates for both iOS and macOS effectively abandon Markdown support. Technically, it’s still there, but it’s incomplete and the new editor does live replacement of the markup with rich text. So '**bold**' immediately becomes bold in rich text form, and there’s no way to go back to editing it as Markdown. This creates a lot of friction for me, and breaks a number of my TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro macros.
On Twitter, the folks at Day One folks have said that Markdown editing will come back at some point, so this may be a bit premature. However, it has made me wonder: are there any similar apps that folks here are using and can recommend? Markdown support is a pretty big priority for me, and I’d like to be able to insert photos and geotag my entries, but I don’t need much beyond that.
I don’t believe it will geotag entries but I use Ulysses and insert pictures in many of my journal entries. They are not formatted as nicely as in Day One but works fine for me.
Right now there’s nothing out there that can incorporate multiple journals, with end-to-end encryption, with multiple photos per post, and can suck in location data as well as tweets, publish to a webpage if wanted, and work with the Apple Watch. And last week they included the ability to accept audio and even transcribe it (by way of Google) if you like.
If you need something simpler that’s just posts with pics, there are tons of iOS and Mac apps that can do that. One solid longtime Mac/iOS product is MacJournal, although I’m not sure how much it’s continuing to be developed.
I used Momento for a few months before switching to Day One. It’s a very solid app, having been on the App Store since 2011, I think. Does much of what Day One does on iOS (and pulls in pics and video and data from more feeds than Day One) but it lacks a Mac app of any kind, and has limited output options. I do prefer the design and colors of the app to Day One as well.
If Momento had had a Mac app I would have more strongly considered keeping it. But I find it personally difficult to do long-form writing on my iOS devices (we’ll see if that changes after the new iPad Pros come out this fall), and currently I absolutely need a Mac-based syncing solution for all my writing.
I have an old registration to MacJournal, which is cross-platform. Longstanding app, solid app on specs but it has not been updated since 2016, and it has the clunky looks of a MarsEdit clone from 2010. From the number of bundle deals in which Mariner Software has slotted its apps for years now, it seems to me like they’re milking their apps and not seriously developing them.
Agreed. I have a few of their apps, but there is nothing recent or new. I used MacJournal a decade ago. It was a good everything bucket. But it looked hideous and sync was awful.
The only good part is that it is possible to extract files from the MacJournal package