To start off with, let’s just say Day One is a top notch application for both Mac and iOS. That’s enough for this introduction because it’s the simple truth—Day One is a damn great journaling software.

When I first heard of Day One, I wanted to compare it to Evernote since they’re both enter-text-daily-and-save-it applications. But I now understand that it’s not a competition between the two of them—they’re two different applications altogether. They may seem similar in many ways but they’ve got completely different purposes in my opinion.

While Evernote is there to catch anything and everything that is on your mind, Day One is more of a pure journaling application. You add entries and they’re organized by their date, simple as that. It’s really simple to use. In fact, what I like most about Day One is that the interface is so much better than Evernote’s—it’s a bliss to use as a journaling software of any kind, no matter if you’re writing a project log book, keeping a diary of your nastiest dreams, or whatever you may want to type down regularly.

One of those small details that I love is that when you launch the app, the first thing you see at the top is an inspirational quote to get you to start writing what’s on your mind. Really love that. You can of course remove it, as well as refresh it to a new quote, but I think it’s a wonderful and unique feature that sets it apart from its competitors. Very cute.

As mentioned, it’s very simple to use. Basically, you’ve got a your calendar with days and entries, and you have your starred entries plus a few reminders. That’s it. That’s what’s in the Twitter-app style sidebar, along with a button for adding a new entry. And that’s kinda the beauty of it all—its simplicity. It seems to be completely designed for daily journaling of any kind—making it as comfortable as possible—beating any competitor that tries to be more.

So what about the Preferences? One awesome thing is that you can enable password protection for you entries, which you may want to do if they’re really private, like mine are sometimes (or maybe I’m just a paranoid IT security freak). You can also enable or disable reminders, setting up when they start and end. General preferences include things like where to keep the database file, whether or not to show the menu bar icon, and a global entry hotkey which is always nice to have, to quickly make a note of anything—again, kinda like Evernote.

At this time and point in it’s lifespan, Day One is very simple to use and in my opinion it’s very targeted towards mere journaling. It can of course be used for much else, but journaling is what it excels at and it’s also what it’s better than Evernote at.

Bottom line, will I replace Evernote with Day One for journaling? I’m not sure. On on hand, I love having everything in one place, and on the other hand I love the interface that Day One offers me. Synchronization is a feature that I really miss, but maybe that’s somewhere down the roadmap.

Day One is really an excellent app for journaling on both Mac and iOS. For that purpose it’s likely the best out there. Let’s just leave it at that!

Link: dayoneapp.com

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