Journal/Diary Apps

1.) Day One

Day One is the rare app that lives up to its hype. The award-winning app’s simplicity and elegance has made it the standard to which all other journal apps are compared. Day One’s best feature may be that it’s so easy and pleasant to use that you actually want to use it. The app has negligible load time, a clean interface, and nearly every feature you would want, such as: the ability to create multiple entries on the same day, style and font choices, optional passcodes and reminders, auto-addition of location and weather data, photos, tags, searching, and exporting all or some entries to PDF. In fact, the developers of Day One add features so often that it’s quite possible that the few features currently lacking (e.g., multiple journals and connections to social networks) will be added by the time you read this. Day One also sets itself apart with its effortless syncing via iCloud that works nearly error-free between iOS devices and the companion Mac app.

 2.) Wonderful Days

Beautiful interface, tons of themes, in-line picture placement, Evernote backup and PDF export will make any journal app desirable. When you include the day rating, geotagged entries, search function, multiple fonts and customizable home screen, this app suddenly becomes the best available for the popular smartphone. Surprisingly, Wonderful Days is only a few months old and the developers have already added some evolutionary updates.

3.) My Daily Journal

My daily journal has exploded in popularity and has been given hundreds of positive ratings in the app store as well. MDJ excels in customization with several beautiful backgrounds and dozens of great fonts. It is also compatible with Dropbox backup and includes one of my favorite features, PDF export.

4.) Remembary Connected Diary

Remembary was clearly designed with social media power users in mind. The app can automatically import all sorts of content as part of your daily entries, including tweets, Facebook updates, images from your camera roll and photo stream, iCal events, and up to five RSS feeds directly. However, instead of adding the data directly into your daily entry, it is placed on a clickable icon on the side. This makes it difficult to see the data when flipping through entries. Remembary also nods to the past with its skeuomorphic design and font, which some may like and others may hate. The app has multiple export options, including formatting entries as data or text, and whether to export to iPad, email, or Dropbox. Remembary does have some notable flaws: it doesn’t support automatic syncing between iPhone and iPads or adding photos to entries manually.

5.) Chronicle- Journal and Writing Notebooks

Chronicle is the successor to the still-popular Chronicle for iPad, and in many ways it has already eclipsed its predecessor. Specifically, Chronicle is a universal app that syncs via iCloud and can be linked to Dropbox to automatically back up each day. The app also supports multiple journals, multiple entries for a given day, Markdown formatting, search, a passcode, reminders, and an extended keyboard. The interface is simple but somehow still a bit confusing to navigate quickly. Aside from some iCloud-related hiccups the developer is investigating, Chronicle’s one clear lack is the ability to export all of your entries as a text file or PDF.

FREE JOURNAL/DIARY APPS

 1.) Everyday Timeline: Personal Journal/Diary with Calendar/Maps/Evernote/Dropbox by Noodle Labs, Inc

Everyday Timeline can automatically import your data— including past data— from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare as separate entries on your timeline. As the name suggests, Everyday Timeline displays your entries on a chronological feed that is sorted by date and time. The app supports tags, multiple entries each day, as well as adding photos, location information, and your mood to entries. Everyday Timeline has virtually no learning curve, gives you statistics about your postings, and can be configured to backup weekly to Dropbox, Evernote, or email, add a passcode lock, reminders, and offer you a daily question. It’s important to note that Everyday Timeline requires users to create an account before using the app, which means that your entries are synced to their website and accessible via any web browser, but all entries are private by default.

2.) Moleskine Journal

Moleskine has been a premiere maker of high end physical journals and notebooks for many years, and their app is a promising start to their digital expansion. The app is only partially successful in translating the analog experience to the digital, but the failure is mostly in execution rather than design. The app is slow, prone to crashing, and has some odd flaws, such as the fact that the text isn’t properly aligned to the lines on the paper and the exclusive use of gestures for navigation. Moleskine does have some great features that set it apart from other apps; specifically, the app supports handwriting as well as text entry, has paintbrush, highlighting, and color options, and allows users to create multiple notebooks with different “paper styles” or templates such as storyboards, weekly planners, and recipes. If the execution problems are corrected, Moleskine could easily become a top app in this category.