With a new year comes big changes, and keeping a journal is an excellent way to keep track of the challenges each day brings. Why kill trees when there are great apps to use instead?
My journaling app of choice is Bear, a free iOS download. While it's not specifically a journaling app, its note-taking abilities are fantastic. It can also be used to make a useful journal-like document.
Bear has an interface that is so minimalist and simple that it is nearly invisible. The screen is essentially split into three columns: The left sidebar helps manage and organise your notes; the middle area is where the notes are listed by the date they were last modified; and the right side is the main place for note writing and editing.
What makes Bear stand out is its tagging system to organise notes. You can use hashtags (denoted by the # symbol) to label whichever piece of text you like; you can look up notes by typing the hashtags into a search field. Best of all is the nested hashtag system, which lets you make a hashtag like #party/planning or #party/guests – meaning you can effectively put notes into searchable folders and subfolders by using hashtags.
Once you get the hang of using hashtags in notes, it becomes very natural to do, and you'll wonder why all note-taking apps don't do this. Bear also lets you control the style of notes you make, including some esoteric ones, like formatting for computer code. Photos can be imported into the text, and notes can be exported in a wide variety of formats.
The app includes helpful guides to using it, and has many free components. Paying to upgrade (a $15 annual fee) unlocks even more features, including cross-device syncing and more themes to change the look of your documents. It is available only on iOS.
If Bear sounds appealing but you're an Android user, check out JotterPad. Like Bear, JotterPad is primarily a note-taking app with an intuitive interface that can easily be used to keep a journal. Though it doesn't have Bear's flexible hashtag system, it does have other powerful writing, formatting, editing and file exporting tools as well as an automatic saving feature. Many of JotterPad's features are free.
While Bear and JotterPad are useful for journaling as well as writing plenty of other documents, Penzu is an Android app designed specifically for creating diary entries. Penzu's interface looks attractive and is easy to use. It lets you make text-based notes, which can have embedded images, and entries can be tagged with labels to group them or to search for similar journal entries in the future.
Penzu's strongest features are its internet-based syncing (so journal entries can be retrieved via a web-based interface without a smartphone) and its built-in privacy lock. This means you should be able to make journal entries about your feelings and thoughts with abandon, secure in the knowledge that if someone picks up your phone for a casual snoop, they won't be able to read what you have written. The app is a free download on Android, and there is also an iOS edition.
On iOS, Grid Diary is another journaling app that makes it easy to type a few sentences a day. This app has a very clean interface and, as its name suggests, is based around creating journal entries in a gridlike pattern.
The idea is that each element of the grid is supposed to inspire you to make notes about daily experiences in a different way – prompting you, for example, to think about what you're grateful for, how you spent your money and how to make tomorrow better. The app's prompts can be customized, and it has an excellent search feature to easily browse through your memories later.
The main part of the app is free, and paying $5 to upgrade provides extras like a passcode locking system, cloud syncing and better text formatting options.
Narrate on Android is another journaling app that combines an attractive interface and excellent diary-keeping features that let you embed photos and tags alongside the text of journal entries. There is also the option to use location-based tags, which means you could trace the destinations you wrote about during a vacation, for example. Narrate is a free download.
Finally, check out Moodnotes, a $4 iOS download that offers a completely different take on the idea of journaling by chronicling your day-to-day mood variations. It's odd at first, but ultimately satisfying.
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Photographers who miss the days of wet chemistry film will enjoy the new app Filmborn, which is an attempt to bring some of the effects that specific films had on traditional photos into the digital smartphone era. Free on iOS, it's a clever and easy-to-use photo-editing app that can definitely add a special look to your imagery.
New York Times