Keeping a Tab on Each Day in 2014 with Mobile Journal App.

A Whole New Technology for A Whole New World

 I know I've been away for years, but I think 2014 is going to be a good year, so let's start it by keeping a tab on each wonderful day of this year with this new and exciting app called "My Wonderful Day". This app is a wonderful personal journal valued at $2 iOS app is designed to be as easy to use as possible. The interface is simple and minimalist, with a mainly black-on-white theme. The home page is a simple calendar display with icons showing which days have entries so you can easily go around it without breaking those nails.

To add a log or journal entry, you click on a small pencil icon, and the app opens a page for typing. After writing the entry, and perhaps appending a photo, you can save the entry or use my two favorite parts of the app: the happiness slider and the stickers feature. The slider acts as an easy way to reflect on how good a day it was, with choices ranging from a darkly unhappy face to a symbolically cheerful one. The sticker book is limited, but it helps assign visual aids to describe the day. You can choose one of some basic weather icons, for example, or a heart or a musical symbol.

 

My Wonderful Days lets a user add an emoticonlike face and stickers to a journal entry.

When you click on a date from the home page, the app shows a preview of the entry with your chosen stickers and happiness index. It’s cute, simple, and a great way to enter little daily log notes and to review what you have been up to recently. I do wish that it were possible to add a video or audio note, though.      

A great alternative is the Moleskine Journal app, from the makers of the long-popular little black notebooks. The app’s interface looks a lot like the books — with the same colors and styling. You can select from several notebook styles, like plain, ruled and squared pages.

Moleskine’s easy-to-use interface is ideal for typing a few simple notes about your day’s experiences, adding photos, or even using the app’s drawing tools to make a quick sketch. To flick through your journal entries, simply swipe through the pages of the notebook, much as you would the physical version.

This app takes a little more effort to use than My Wonderful Days because it lacks a calendar function, leaving the date annotation up to you. But the design makes using the app very pleasant. One gripe is that the interface can be confusing, largely because there are so many editing options. Sometimes you end up drawing on a page when you really wanted to scroll. 

The app is free on iOS and Windows Phone. It’s also free on Android, but it’s available only for Samsung devices through Samsung’s own store.

For traditional journal writing with some modern twists, check out Day Journal on Android (free) and Day One on iOS ($5). These are more like My Wonderful Days, but have more complexity and more features.

Day Journal, for example, can lock away your diary from prying eyes and show statistics about your writing. Day One can automatically append weather information to entries or track activity through the motion sensor on the iPhone 5S.

Both apps will take time to master, but the time may be worth it because of the extra details you can save.  Moleskine Journal mimics the look of paper notebooks.

                                   

And here’s an entirely different idea about creating a life journal: 1 Second Everyday. This app, $1 on iOS and free (for 30 days) on Android, is meant to create a powerful video journal.

With the app, you could easily capture a whole year in your life, or maybe just a vacation, by stringing together one-second video clips. The idea is that a one-second video clip can capture a significant moment, location, event or emotion.

The app’s interface is designed to make it easy to capture the one-second movie quickly, which is useful if an unexpected event happens. It can even remind you through the day to take a video. Users have reported some interface problems with iOS, but the developer seems to have been working hard to fix them as they arise. It’s probably worthwhile to regularly back up the clips you make.

Happy journaling.

Quick Call

Confide is a new messaging app for iOS. Two users of the app can share private text messages that are viewable only by them. The messages cannot be captured in a screen shot and “self-destruct” after being read. Aimed at professionals wanting to keep chats confidential, the app is free.

culled from nytimes.com