Me and significant other would like to explore collaborative journaling. Ideally, this can also capture our travel memories which are currently scattered over our separate devices. We are mostly Apple, except she uses a windows laptop and sometimes an android phone.
I like DayOne and subscribe to it. It does not offer family sharing and there is no way to collaborate except sharing an account, which I would like to avoid. We tried Waffle, but not as easy to use as DayOne and cannot collaborate on each entry.
Other apps that I have explored are Craft, Mem and Evernote. Our entries will be majorly pictures or short videos, and less of text. And these are text oriented apps.
By elimination, I’m leaning towards Apple notes except it can’t work on Windows or Android. Or alternatively One Note.
Apple Notes is actually pretty great for something like this, and wile the web version is not great it is usable for when you are Windows/Android. (at least for adding text)
Try OneNote. I’ve relied on OneNote for many years (before the recent onslaught of PKM apps, it got me through my master’s couple of years ago just fine). I still use it for notes for some projects (mostly because of the abysmal support most PKM apps have for tables).
Pros: It’s free, you can easily share notebooks with another user/account, and it’s cross-platform. Mac and iOS/iPadOS apps are fine, not as feature-rich as the Windows version but they work pretty well. It syncs via OneDrive, you get 5 GB of storage space for free, and the sync nowadays is reliable (there have been issues in the past but syncing issues are now rare). The notebook/section/page paradigm with regard to organising the notebook is logical and straightforward. There’s no learning curve, anyone who’s used any Office app can start using OneNote right away.
Cons: You can insert images but it will be a series of consecutive images (not a gallery like in Craft, there are no customisation options and it’s a bit cumbersome to move them around much once inserted); the Android app is not great (it’s fine, but it’s the least feature-rich of all); the export options are not great (you can print and export to PDF but the formatting is not great — then again, exporting notes from AN is an issue as well); I don’t think you can insert videos on iOS/iPadOS, you can insert them on Mac but they will not appear as in-line videos but as links to files; strangely, when it comes to videos, OneNote can display previews for embedded YT and TikTok videos.
Overall, if it’s mostly text and pictures and there’s a need for two or more people to work on the same notebook with changes appearing in-sync in real-time across several platforms (with an indicator who wrote what), it’s a pretty solid product with a promise of some really interesting integrations once Microsoft Loop components launch.
Thanks. I have not used one note in a very long time and often get tempted to try it again. I subscribe to Office 365 so I do have that 1TB cloud space included.
I remember one note has that notebook way of organization and allows collaborative writing.
I will check it out to see how we feel using it for our purpose.
