I'm going to start a series of app reviews. My first post is on a Journaling app called Day One. Lora and I have been using Day One for a few years now to document our kids growing up. We also document our travel and a few other things. The reality of our phones these days is that they are incredible tools for photographing and documenting life's memories and moments, but the easy of capture means that are camera rolls are a jumbled mess of pictures mixing things, people, places, documents and so on. No one wants to organize this and we are a few years out from amazing AI to clean all this up for us. Even if we did have that amazing AI, I find that I like adding a few bits of text here and there to augment memories, places and events.

Day One is an absolutely awesome app for doing all this stuff and I really appreciate how it gives us a diary of our lives.

In the Day One app you create journal entries. Each entry can have photos, text, location, and it also records music you are listening to or activity such as how many steps you've walked that day. You can also tag locations with more specific data using Apple Maps or Foursquare.

There are lots of uses of the app. We use it for 1) Family journal, 2) Travelogue, 3) Instagram backup, 4) Sake tasting, 5) Photography journal

Day One is available on macOS, iOS and web with cloud sync. There are numerous third party integrations as well. One of my favorite features is their "on this day" which many of you probably know from Facebook now. This is a way to re-live past events and memories.

Journal Entries

Below is the Journal entry screen. To date, over a thousand entries spanning 469 days and 1200 photos. You can create an entry from an existing photo, or capture a new one.

On this day

I mentioned before, but Day One reminds you of days in the past where you recorded a journal entry.

You'll get a notification like this

Which will take you to the app and show you what happened that day, and what photos were taken on that day in the past year and every year since then. You can see I have a few photos clustered around the Seattle area on July 4th.

Aww, look. Now I can remember the day that Miles learned to swim. It appears this happened on July 4th in Cle Elum WA. And wow, it was 99 degrees and sunny!

Many Journals

Below is a list of all the journals that I have in the app.

Family Journal

We use Day One to record all our important memories and activities.

You can see in this case a mix of photos and text entries from Father's day this past year. We also record all the funny things our 5 year old has been saying since he could talk.

Travel Journal

On our recent trip to Japan, we used Day One to record everything we did. Places we went, experiences, food we ate. When we go back this will be invaluable to us.

Here you can see all the photos and locations of entries in Kyoto.

The Shinkansen bullet train was one of my favorite experiences, and here is the train in Kyoto station.

One of the places we visited was the Bamboo Grove in Arashiyama and you can see the rich information captured along with the journal entry.

Instagram Backup

I mentioned that I also use Day One as a backup of my Instagram posts. This is pretty easy to do and gives me a way to easily see and find them.

Adding Entries

There are many ways to add entries to Day One. My favorite is to use the 3D Touch feature on the iPhone 6S models.

Day One also has a Share Extension allowing you to share from many apps to Day One.

Final Thoughts

This is a really great app. My wife and I use it a lot and I'm thankful we have a nice simple way to record the daily happenings of life. As I've found, I really cherish re-living these moments. It's much less overwhelming than looking through all the photos in my camera roll (I've pretty much given up on that).

Day One is $4.99 in the App Store, currently 50% off.

★★★★★
Exceptional. Must have app.

Download DayOne