I’ve been using Day One for a long time, over ten years now. I have over 4000 entries and consider it one of the most important apps I use every day. I can’t point to anything big, but there seems to be dozens of paper cut like issues making the app harder to use. I find their pointless UI changes very frustrating. Day view was moved under Calendar and then you have to tap on the 3 dots and select Day view, but there are no other features added to this, why the change other than to make it harder to find? What used to be a single tap access was turned into 3 taps.
I find constant small issues with the UI. Just now I was adding a new entry on my iPad and the text kept scrolling off the screen. I had to quit and reopen the app a few times to finish typing. I also had trouble adding a photo, again pointless UI changes making it hard to do things that were easy in the past.
I’m really reluctant to switch to another app since I have so many entries, but I’m getting worried that this app is circling the drain.
I’m not up to speed with Day One, having left it several years ago for similar reasons.
I was able to export and import at least 4,000 entries to Diarly and Everlog and carry on journalling. I currently have about 5,000 entries across 8 journals in Diarly and a little more in Everlog (I recently moved Diarly to Everlog).
I understand the caution, but it’s certainly not impossible to move a decade or more of journal entries. I remember initially buying a month’s subscription of Diarly and Everlog and going for it. The text transfer was flawless. I ended up spending about six hours, in total, reattaching some of the (photo etc.) attachments. There were some losses with things like weather and location, where Day One’s internal coding and those in the new programs were incompatible. Tags did not transfer seamlessly - I ended up deleting them all in the end.
The important thing is that you don’t have to commit to a new program until you want to. Everything stays exactly as it was in Day One - in fact it took ages for me to convince them that I really did want them to delete my account and everything in it and that was about 6 months after the initial move.
I have been using the Apple Journal for one ‘thread’ of my life and it has made me really appreciate Day One. It’s so flexible and I share little singlets of inspiration from various programs.
So you think I’m overreacting to the paper cuts? Maybe that’s what happens when you use an app for so long, you notice the flaws more than the good things.
I had 9 years in Day One, but around the time iOS journal was released I started to get a few syncing/data glitches in Day One. They were not disastrous, more worrying, so I moved to Apple’s journal. I like the simplicity of it, but with the Advanced Data Protection no longer available in the UK I am tentatively looking to see what other offerings are around.
Everlog and Diarly are two apps by single developers, both of whom are generous in supporting their apps and passionate about them. I’d say either is a solid choice.
I’m currently with Everlog, having happily used Diarly for several years. It looks better, is slightly simpler (i.e. has slightly fewer features which is a good thing IMHO) and the “On this day” list is clean and very well presented. Journal suggestions from the OS look better in Everlog than they do in Diarly. In the last couple of years, Diarly has begun to look different on Phone, iPad and Mac and offers some attractive features (like automatically adding your steps and workouts and sleep to journal entries when you tell it to ) but that’s at the cost of proprietary template code that does not export well.
Hmm, I’m wary of single developer apps for something so important. They can easily lose interest, get sick, sell to a bigger company that loses interest, etc.
I see the irony of Day One falling into this same pattern even though it wasn’t a single developer app.
I did not attempt to do so (I’ve had Day One sitting there as I wasn’t fully committed to moving off it, even though it’s been a few years!). I did look into it though. There is no direct way to export from Day One and import into Apple Journal. However, Apple Journal has Shortcuts support (*) including a “Create Entry” shortcut. Shortcuts is able to process JSON, and Day One can export entries as JSON. So I believe the building blocks are there to write a semi-complex shortcuts “script” to export from Day One and import to Journal.
(*) Confusingly, I can only add Journal-related shortcuts when creating a shortcut on iOS, not on macOS.
It sounds complicated to me as I have never really works with the (powerful) Shortcuts.
But it might be worth as I would love to have all roundabout 800 Day One entries in Journal.
All apps and ecosystems will eventually pass away, as will everything else. Even if they remain, they will change over time, sometimes beyond recognition. Apps from solo developers do seem more vulnerable (to illness, life pressure, boredom etc.) but companies and corporations are just as vulnerable to failure and even more likely to be acquired, restructured, refocused etc… Day One was a tiny team for years, failed and was about to disappear and was acquired by Automattic. That company’s priorities and decisions are not guaranteed for the future.
That’s exactly why the ability to export all your work in formats that do not require the original app to use, and where you can realistically work out the format and structure so it can be imported somewhere else is critically important. Both Diarly and Everlog produce clean, structured markdown exports. They’re well ahead of Day One and Apple Journal in the ease of transferring data to and from them. That’s about as good as it gets.
This is so key, particularly as I’ve been testing out the various journal apps. Although Apple’s Journal has an export feature, it’s more human-parseable than machine-parseable. I’m thinking of moving to Everlog and one of the attractions is the clear obvious text/markdown/JSON export format which means that I could write my own tools to move that data around, reducing lock-in risk. That is something I worry about with using Apple’s products, although the convenience for e.g. Apple Notes sometimes outweighs the concern.
I also have the problem of my entry scrolling off the screen on my iMac.
Day One is an important record for me to search for events, but I am concerned about data security. I have been considering transferring my records to DEVONthink that is stored exclusively on my hard drive and local back-ups. So far I have not had the time or energy to make the transition with the inevitable fine tuning that will be needed.
I have just exported almost 9000 Day One entries into a zipped text fie. I subsequently asked ChatGPT to separate the single file into separate markdown files for each day. At first glance it seems to have worked perfectly so I have a back-up of all my entries that I can add to DEVONthink. The whole process took only a few minutes.
