Questions from a MacJournal user
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I have been using MacJournal since 2011 and love it, but it appears the developer has discontinued answering any inquiries from people, so I am leery of continuing using an abandoned product where I invest so much time and energy into (a journal!). I’m looking for a replacement. I have been using Day One on my phone, which I definitely like better than Apple’s Journal. But since I do most of my writing on my Mac, I have questions about the Mac version.
- On all the screenshots I see of the Mac version of Day One, I don’t see any view that isolates an individual entry. The view looks like a Mail view with a list of titles and the selected title’s entry on the side. In MacJournal, I use the view where some titles are listed, but it’s not as intrusive as this Mail-looking view. MacJournal also has Focus Mode, which blocks out everything else. Does the Mac version of Day One offer views not included on the Features web page?
- I only use my iPhone journals (MacJournal, Day One, Apple Journal) occasionally as supplemental writing, and currently I manually transfer them to my computer’s MacJournal. I think I would NOT want to sync my phone to the Day One Sync because I don’t want all that data (the large number of journal entries) on my phone. Can the sync to Day One Sync be device specific? For example, I’d have a Day One account and use it on both my Mac and iPhone, but only sync the Mac to Day One Sync. (I would continue to sync my phone journal to iCloud for backup.)
- If I have a free plan, can I run Day One on two devices (i.e. Mac and iPhone) as long as I don’t use Day One Sync?
Thank you for any answers provided, which will help me in my decision about what direction to go with my journaling software.
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Question 1
In a typical outlay for Day One, you have two panes. The left pane is for seeing and choosing from multiple individual journal entries. You can choose between a few different views in the left pane, but for this explanation use the Timeline view (select the views in the View menu).
The right pane is for viewing and editing one individual journal entry.
The Timeline view shows you all the journal entries for a given journal, displayed in chronological order. If you click a journal entry in the Timeline view, it will populate the right pane with that entry and you can edit it.
If you want to see a journal entry in a separate window—one that has only the journal entry and not the left pane—then double-click the target journal entry in the Timeline view and it opens in a separate window.
I recommend that you look at the App Store for macOS. The page for Day One shows examples of this.
In my normal usage, I open the journal entry with my whole-day to-do list in a separate window (which I position alongside the main window) and then use the main window to add, edit, or delete individual entries. But it’s really a personal preference.
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Question 2.
You can selectively disable synchronization for individual devices. Day One support would probably strongly recommend against this. You should be sure that it’s what you really want as the journals on the two devices will become (pardon the pun) out of synch.
To disable the synchronization on the iPhone:
- Go to the Settings screen by tapping the round user icon in the upper right of the main screen.
- Toggle the Sync option to Off.
The synchronized journal entries managed on the Mac will then exist in two places: on your Mac and on the Day One servers. The unsynchronized entries managed on your iPhone will exist in only one place: on your iPhone.
You can still do forms of back-up of the journal data that’s on the iPhone.
- Use the built-in iOS back-up.
- Export entries to JSON format files.
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