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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Welcome @balloongenerously14f93f1652, and thanks for your interest in Day One! Great questions – and thanks to @stevekoterski for the helpful replies.
To add a bit more context:
Mac views: As stevekoterski mentioned, the Mac app doesn’t currently have a dedicated Focus Mode. A couple of extra options worth knowing about:
- The web version at dayone.me does have a built-in Focus Mode
- On Mac, Cmd+Shift+N opens a standalone entry window for a cleaner writing space
- A distraction-free mode for Mac is on our ideas board and being considered by our product team
Selective Sync: Stevekoterski is right – Selective Sync lets you choose which journals are downloaded to each device, so you could keep your full collection on your Mac and only have select journals on your phone. However…
Free plan on two devices: The free plan is limited to a single device, so if you sign into your Day One account on both your Mac and iPhone, you’ll be prompted to upgrade (or transfer your journals to the phone). To use Day One on multiple devices with sync, you’d need a Premium subscription.
That said, you could use Day One on your iPhone without signing in, or with a separate account – but those entries would be local to that device. You’d need to export them from your iPhone and import them into your Mac account to bring everything together. Not the smoothest workflow, but it is an option if you want to try things out on both devices before committing to Premium.
Importing from MacJournal: Since you’ll be migrating, we support plain text import on Mac (File > Import), and there are some third-party tools that may help with the transition. These aren’t officially supported, but they’ve been useful for others making the switch.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
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Thank you @stevekoterskiand @staff-donnie for your responses to my question. They were helpful.
@staff-donnie, I have a question about the import. My MacJournal has multiple journals, with the largest two having over 3000 in one and 1500 in the other. I saw the instructions about date formatting and such in your link. Do you know if this method works for importing from MacJournal? Like, could I do a single import for the journal with 3000 entries?
Another question: Can DayOne macOS version be downloaded directly from Day One? I have had bad experiences with Apple’s Mac App store and I prefer not to get software from there.
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Hi @balloongenerously14f93f1652!
We don’t have a native MacJournal import feature, but the plain text import on Mac can work for bulk imports. You’d export your MacJournal entries as plain text, then import them into Day One via File > Import > Plain Text File.
The catch is that each entry in the file needs the date formatted correctly for Day One to recognize it. With 3000+ entries, manually reformatting dates would be impractical—so you’d likely need to use a script or find-and-replace to convert MacJournal’s date format to what Day One expects.
Regarding direct downloads, unfortunately, Day One for Mac is only available through the Mac App Store—there’s no direct download option.
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