Apple Journal 📱📓

This morning, I spent a couple of hours with Apple Journal. I've been excited about this app since it was announced some months back, and now that it’s here, I guess I'm a little disappointed.

Earlier this year, I gave Day One another shot when I closed my blog. I like the app, although I feel like it might have a bit of feature creep going on, but overall, it works well. My biggest concern is that Automattic doesn't prioritize it. It hasn't evolved much over the past few years, and when software gets deprioritized, it definitely concerns me.

I was hoping Apple would steal most of the features of Day One, but they decided to go another way and keep everything super simple. In fact, the only real feature to the app is the AI driven prompts. Apple and third-party developers can nudge users to journal about podcasts, photos, or stuff that was done in an app, and I guess that's supposed to motivate people to write. I'm not really sure, that's not how my writing process works at all.

I decided I'd port over all my posts from Day One, which meant copying and pasting/exporting the text of each entry since there is no import function. After a hundred entries, I grew tired of the repetitive motion of exporting, scrolling to the top, editing the date, repeat.

There is no title for the posts nor is there any way to sort the entries into more organized tags or even smaller text. It's just bulky and while this is the first day of an app that will no doubt grow, I'm concerned Apple is never going to offer an export function and my writings will be locked into this Journal app forever.

In all honesty, Apple Notes makes for a way better journal app than Journal. You can at least organize your notes, break them down into categories and still retain a simple and minimalistic view.

I wish I wouldn't have wasted so much time porting over my entries this morning, because I've decided Journal isn't for me right now. I'll be happy to check back once some updates have occurred, but until then I'll just keep rambling on about things on this blog and handwriting my journal when I need a little more privacy.