Two days ago, Day One journaling app for iOS and OS X by Bloom Built has celebrated its third anniversary.
Having been a user since Day One’s inception, I couldn’t be happier with its clean and elegant design, rich Markdwon support and carefully balanced set of features letting me keep my personal memories, photos and life’s best moments neatly organized in one place.
To this date, virtually not a day has gone by without me firing up Day One on my iPhone to capture my thoughts and feelings or simply snap up a memorable moment in time and spice it up with a punchy caption.
I also love Day One’s inline photos, how it integrates location data from Foursquare, pulls weather information for entries and keeps my diary synchronized between iOS and Mac devices through iCloud. These are just some of the factors that prompted Apple to name Day One its 2012 Mac App of the Year and 2011 #1 Best App in the Mac App Store.
And now, Bloom Built has updated the iOS edition with Publish, a major new capability that turns your private entries into attractive web pages, available to anyone or just the people with whom you’ve shared the URL of the entry – the choice is yours.
Jump past the fold for the full breakdown…
When you publish something in the new Day One 1.13, the app creates an individual webpage on the dayone.me domain and gives you the URL you can then share with family members and friends, as opposed to sharing with the web at large.
This means that only folks with whom you’ve shared the entry URL will be able to open it in a web browser. I haven’t published anything yet, but you can check out how web entries look like at a test page from the developers.
Should you need to share your “posts” with a larger community, Day One now lets you share an URL of a published entry on Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. As a huge bonus, all your Markdown formatting gets proper HTML styling when published.
Inline images will be added in the future.
It’s cool that published entries retain social sharing stats and links, including views, likes and shares, with each post on social networks being accompanied by useful stats like views for dayone.me, retweet and favorite counts for Twitter and so forth.
And, when you update an item in the iPhone app, Day One automatically posts changes to the published entry. Of course, you can remove published entries from the iPhone app at any time, with a simple tap.
Federico Viticci who runs MacStories shared a pair of published entries here and here, writing in his Day One review that Publish struck him as an undeniably convenient, fast and elegant new feature.
Day One founder Paul Mayne told Viticci that the guiding principle behind Publish was to turn the app into “a complete record of your life – private, personal entries and semi-public and public entries posted on social media sites”.
Publish will support more social services in the future, with new customization options planned for entries to control how they are shared to each service.
The Publish feature is currently available for the iPhone only, but don’t worry – Bloom Built says the feature will be coming to the iPad in a future update.
To learn more about Publish, check out Day One’s blog post.
Day One 1.13 also includes the following fixes:
- Improved app responsiveness and speed
- Updated TextExpander support
- Tap “new entry” button in read mode to create a photo or text entry
- Implemented iRate prompt (only prompts once)
- Stability improvements
- Various bug fixes
There’s something liberating about recording one’s feelings on a daily basis.
I now know that keeping a journal gives my feelings an outlet like no other. What’s more, the value of your diary increases as time goes by. I fancy myself ten, twenty years from now re-visiting some of the most memorable moments from my past and it’s going to be ridiculously easy and fun thanks to Day One, an app that’s made me want to journal my life.
If you haven’t tried Day One yet, I wholeheartedly recommend giving it a whirl – even if the thought of keeping a journal seems dull. The app was updated last November with iOS 7 styling and support for Apple’s 64-bit A7 processor.
Day One for iPhone and iPad is $4.99 in the App Store.
The universal app requires an iOS device supported by iOS 7.0 or later.
The Mac edition of Day One is $9.99 in the Mac App Store.
It requires a Mac with a 64-bit Intel chip and OS X 10.7.4 or later.
To learn more about the app, check out the official website.
Are you a Day One user?
If not, what other journaling apps are in your iOS software arsenal?