The new entry previews are – unfortunately – really bad. Ideas on how to fix.
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As in the title, the new entry previews added in 2023.15 are sadly very bad. The reason for this is several. The bigger font size means you’ll see less of your title, meaning many of them breaks into two lines and ends with a (…) which doesn’t look good. In addition, preview of the content itself is gone if you have images in the post, and/or if your title breaks into two lines. Instead a whole line is dedicated to tags. Why are even tags showing in this view? The new image previews on the entries also makes it look very cluttered. It was much better before when the image “square” if you will always were filled with the image(s). Now it’s only filled if 1 or 4 or more images. If you have 3 or 2 you get an odd view breaking the visuals completely.
I’m not sure what is going on with Day One lately, maybe there has been a change in staff making the designs/calling the shots or something which I guess happens. I care greatly for this app because I’ve been using it since… pretty much day one of it’s launch and I’d like to keep doing so for years to come. I hope the trend I’m seeing will turn around soon. And I don’t mean to offend anyone by voicing my concern. There are things I’m also looking forward to which I have for years already, like being able to edit my journal on the web. Ever since I switched from mac to windows I’ve been missing the option to journal using a keyboard on the big screen and my journaling dropped considerably. So I’m exited for this option.
Here are some suggestions on how to improve the entry previews:
– Revert the font size so we can see more of the preview again.
– Stick to one size of the image preview box (prefferably square) and fill it regardless if the post has 1, 2, 3, 4 or more images.
– Remove tags from the entry preview.
– The journal name, time of day, location data etc. is also not needed. Another way to preview what journal it belongs to could be by using a colored bar to the left of the big date/day number, or color the background of the it with the color of the journal.Thanks for reading <3
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Same here. When I first opened the app after the update, I was astonished then I got really really sad, like I was about to loose one of my favorite and most frequently used apps.
Let me add one more here — the width of the content preview is truncated under some conditions, making the timeline looking very ugly. I would assume it’s a bug, for I can’t think of any good reasoning behind it.
For example, I have entries titled “Gym” with tags, for which the content preview area is narrowed to the width of the title, followed awkwardly by an empty space that goes all the way to the right. Entries without a tag are not affected.
The timeline would look like this:
Gym
Lore…
SomeTag
9:20 PMEntry with tag
Lorem ipsum…
SomeTag
9:10 PMEntry without tag
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incidid…
9:00 PMThanks!
P.S. My first Day One entry is dated back in Apr 2011. I can be patient ;-) -
I couldn’t agree more with the above comments. I have been an enthusiastic DayOne user since ~2013 and I was in shock when I opened the app yesterday morning.
I create one entry per day and add one photo (no more, no less) to each entry, so with the new view, the font is huge and there are large gaps between photos. I also went from being able to see 8+ entries on one screen to 5 1/2. It is not an efficient use of screen space and looks like it was designed for a grandmother phone with users who can’t see smaller font sizes.
This app has always been beautiful, elegant and simple, which is why I’ve been a committed and satisfied user since the early days. This most recent update had a bigger impact on my mental health than any other app update that I can recall.
Please, please restore the previous entry timeline, or at least give users the option to revert to it. This entry view was a classic case of “don’t fix what ain’t broken”.
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FWIW, just adding my two cents – the use of the screen especially on a phone is just awful now… at least give us an option to use the old style if you really want to pursue this UX disaster as your favoured option.
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I’m also bummed the total # of checkboxes ticked (7/10) per entry were removed from the entry preview.
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I opened Dayone from iPad and thought something wrong in my iPad or iPad OS till reaching here. Does Dayone team fire some staff who really can do the job?
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I couldn’t agree more – please please DayOne change it back to what it was before! I’ve used DayOne for going on 10 years and have over 4000 entries – it’s been wonderful up until this change!
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Hi James, thanks for your awareness and reply. Hope the action is fast enough. As the name Dayone, we stay with your APP and see it every day, either in a good mood or frustrating mood.
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Version 2023.16 was released on August 4th, and includes a number of fixes for the newly released. Please make sure you’ve updated to the recent release, and let us know if you have additional feedback we can share with the engineering and design teams.
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Thanks for updating! It’s definitely a lot better, but I still don’t like that it is more difficult for me to easily distinguish between entries from different journals. To only have the colour difference on one tiny word isn’t enough and easy to miss if I’m scrolling looking for something.
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Thanks for the update but I have 3 comments.
- In the timeline, when you have 2 or 3 pictures, the image is split and difficult to see. Wish it was just a square image.
- It is better if the tags are not displayed since more sentences can be displayed.
- The number of photos displayed using the + number is incorrect vs the actual number of pictures.
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I like others appreciate the update where the font size has been returned to normal, thanks. However…
I do not understand why tags, journal name and location address is taking up 50% of the entry preview still. Isn’t that considered footnote data, search data, not presentational data? It’s data that is nice to have for when searching for things in my journal, or at the end of a full entry, not for when scrolling through your previews, your memories.
If it’s something you insist on keeping (for reasons I do not understand), would you perhaps consider to make it optional? As in, let us have the option to turn off tags and location address via settings? I don’t know about you, but I’m more interested in reading a full sentence from my entry as a preview instead of seeing irrelevant data like “cat, dog, travel, breakfast, name of person, blue, tru…” and “my very long location 47, city na…” of every single entry in the feed, 50% of it too.
Examples
This is what Dayone still does, even with the font size being reverted to normal size. In the first example, you won’t even be getting a preview of your text, not even your full title:
This is my title, it might be a bit long, so
Dayone will make it two…
cat, travel, breakfast, name of person, blue, tru…
Journal – 09:25 – My Location 47, City Na… – 8F Sho…This is my title, it’s a bit shorter
And so begins my entry preview, it’s still…
cat, travel, breakfast, name of person, blue, tru…
Journal – 09:25 – My Location 47, City Na… – 8F Sho…——————————————–
Wouldn’t this be nicer? To show more of what actually matters?
This is my title, it might be a bit long, so
Dayone will make it two…
And so begins my entry preview, it’s still…
Journal – 09:25 – 8F Showers NearbyThis is my title, it’s a bit shorter
And so begins my entry preview, it’s still not much, but
this at least gives me an idea of what’s inside, don’t…
Journal – 09:25 – 8F Showers NearbyPersonally I would even want the 4th line used for preview of actual content, but at least I would like to have the address removed from it cause it doesn’t look good with all these lines ending in (…).
Thank you for reading <3
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Thanks for Dayone’s action to bring the fonts size back! However, I still feel not so comfortable about the this preview panel format, either in iPhone or iPad. I am not professional enough to figure our where something can be improved. I may agree korlian’s feedback above. Maybe let me try my best to figure out something. Hi Dayone team, I hope you can feel your APP from the users’ side. The tags are not important. Even the exact hour and minute are not important. Our feeling in the sentences are important. I hope to recall our feeling and track when open Dayone, which help me to bring some awareness in my life. That was I got from the very old preview panel format.
Thank you for taking some minutes to read my feedback.
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