I’ve been thinking a lot about journaling on my iPhone after last week’s post. While I’ve had Notes, Evernote, and WriteRoom pretty much since I got my first iPhone, I haven’t ever bothered with a dedicated journaling app until now. I’m not going to give you an in-depth review of any of them because 1) there are a bunch, and I have only two of them (so far~~) 2) I haven’t checked out all the features–I’m sure there are a ton I haven’t even found yet and 3) I’m not a review writer. I’m a peek-giver: I’m much better at giving someone a peek at something and then letting them find out more on their own. I worry too much about misleading people to be a great reviewer.
Having said that, I can point you to some people who do reviews. I’ve found Easy Journaling helpful in my search for The Perfect Journaling App, and there’s some great stuff there to check out.
At Mashable, there’s a review of five apps.
Momento
Wonderful Days
I picked out two apps that had fairly good ratings, Wonderful Days and Momento, and have begun playing around with them. What I liked about Wonderful Days is that it will sync with Evernote, which I already have (but haven’t used more than just a couple times). I can’t tell you how this works yet–I’m still trying to figure out how to tell it to do what I want it to do–but if it allows me to write something on one device and update it on another, I’ll be a happy camper.
What I liked about Momento is that you can link it to your social media sites and import all your tweets and/or Facebook updates, which are then filed by date. You can go to any date and find out what you tweeted and posted. It will import past info, but only the last 3200 tweets from Twitter, so if you’re a prolific tweeter, this might be only a couple weeks’ worth. Still, after that, it imports as you tweet). I did this, and it’s really cool: I can scroll through the calendar for last year and click on a date and see what I was tweeting about that day, complete with photos. (Of the cats, mostly.)
Here’s a review of Wonderful Days. Here’s one for Momento.
A perfect journaling app, for me, would have options for backgrounds that looked like paper-Kraft paper, handmade paper, old ledger paper, ruled yellow paper–and lots of options for fonts. It would have emoticons for things like appointments, phone calls, the weather–just like the stickers we used when I first started keeping a journal (as opposed to the diary I started when I was five) in 1973. We were HUGE on stickers back then. You could sort by the stickers–all the entries with a phone emoticon would show up together if you clicked on it. It would also import tweets and status updates, and it would let me import email messages I wanted to save. It would let me scan and save receipts and would have some system of color-coded tabbing, and–this is big–it would have a desktop application that syncs seamlessly, so I could make an entry while I’m sitting at my desk and then, if I have to get up and go do something and don’t get to finish it, I could finish it on the iPhone while I’m having a latte at Starbucks. There are various apps that do each of these things but none I’ve found that do them all. I’m sure it’s just a few months away, though, if developers know there’s a market for it. So go buy a couple apps (you could get two or three for the price of a venti caramel macchiato), try them out, write some reviews. And let me know what you find out there~~happy hunting!
Ricë also blogs at The Voodoo Cafe.
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