This is Technology Bytes, episode 36, for November 12th, 2023.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy, and here we go.
As you know by now, I live on the bleeding edge often for technologies and software, those kind of things.
And because of that I run the beta versions of iOS and macOS and all those things.
I guess because it’s kind of fun and I’m not all that worried about breaking things.
They’ve been pretty stable.
I haven’t run into issues.
And because of that I get to experience things earlier than those who are more patient than I and wait.
And this week I want to talk about one of those things, which is the Journal app from Apple.
Apple promised this Journal app when they talked about iOS 17 at WWDC.
So it’s been a while.
They did say it would come out later in the year.
So I wasn’t expecting it right away, but now it is available.
And I happen to be someone who does journaling.
So first I want to talk about why someone might want to journal.
And then I’ll talk about the app and what it looks like and how I think it works.
So one of the questions is why journal?
And I’ve been doing a daily journal for almost 10 years, maybe going on almost 11 years.
And I started it when things weren’t going super for me.
And I think it was just a matter of being able to record and lay my thoughts out to no one in particular, but just to me and then potentially be able to share that later with those I love or those close to me.
So then you might wonder why Apple did a Journal app.
Well, it really fits in exactly with what I was doing and why I journal.
It’s because journaling has been shown to be good for mental health.
And the reality is that is why I journal.
It is for my mental health to be able to record things when they aren’t going well and get some perspective, to be able to record things that are going well and maintain perspective, and be able to have some grounds for why I feel the way I do, or maybe some grounds for why I should not feel the way I do.
And it just helps in the stability of my mental health.
I think Apple recognizes that, and they thought in their quest to be a health-forward company, especially with the introduction of the Apple Watch, and I’ve talked about how I use that for health, just other things that can be done, they thought maybe a Journal app that would work for all of their users would be a thing they could do to help in the health arena.
And in that, they chose to go with a very simple app, the simplicity of just capturing thoughts.
And there’s not much fluff in it.
I have used Day One for all of those years that I’ve been doing a journal.
It keeps track of how many steps I take.
It keeps track of the weather.
It keeps track of, I don’t know, a plethora of things that you can put in the journal.
And it makes it kind of interesting because you can go back and see not just your thoughts and what you wrote down, but you can also see what was happening maybe around you at that time, what you were doing physically along with what you might have been doing outside or inside based on what the weather was.
And it is a very good app, and I don’t think Apple’s Journal app replaces it at all.
However, I find that just a simple Journal app, and I don’t do much in the Day One.
I just write my thoughts and capture the emotions of the moment or for the day.
And so the Journal app actually fits my idea quite effectively.
And there’s very little on the screen.
There’s very little distraction.
It’s just capture your thoughts.
But the one thing that Apple’s done, and I think Day One has a similar option, but I’ve never used it, is prompts.
And so I’ll talk about those for a minute.
First, let me say that when I first started the Journal app, there was nothing in it.
I went through, well, I mean as far as prompts go.
I went through and looked at the settings to try to see how I could make it happen, read online about what to do to make it happen, and I had done all the things that were set.
It’s fairly simple.
Like I said, it’s a simple app.
It majors in simplicity, if you will.
But it didn’t take very long.
Sorry about that.
For the phone to get to know me.
And so all this is done on device.
It’s not doing anything in the cloud.
And so all of a sudden I’ve got recent pictures, exercise things I’ve done, past pictures.
So I can look at recent pictures and then just capture what was going on and why those pictures got taken.
For instance, today we went to some kind of a little dinosaur exhibit, took a lot of pictures of our grandkids with these dinosaur things, and it was fun.
And so when I opened my Journal app, it has those pictures front and center.
The other thing I do is exercise quite a bit.
So there’s always a prompt about the health and how I was feeling when I did this walk or I did this fitness exercise or whatever.
There have been history of past items kind of reminiscing and photos from recent past to very pretty far distant past from whenever I started doing digital photography.
What did you think at this moment?
What do these pictures remind you of kind of thing?
And then there are word prompts like, you know, tell me about a time that someone did something kind for you or tell me something that is encouraging that happened today or do you recall giving someone advice that made you feel good?
So they have these word prompts that can help you think about what you might want to write as well.
When the Journal app became available and I said that I was using Day One, I really decided to change.
I knew I was going to anyway because I’m an Apple nerd and I like Apple products and I wanted to test this app and see what it was like.
And so far, so good.
The one thing about Day One is that I can write in Markdown language and get lines and tables and all kinds of things that I want.
And in the Apple Journal app, it is just words as far as I can tell.
Nothing fancy, no Markdown language, no tables, no links.
I may be wrong in that one, but at the moment I haven’t seen anything like that.
It’s just simple recording.
Some pictures, you can do your location, you can do audio recording if you’d like.
But all in all, it’s quite simple.
And I like it.
It makes it easy to capture my thoughts.
There’s nothing in the way.
And I haven’t done it long enough.
It’s only been out for, what, a week, maybe a couple days longer.
So I don’t have very many entries.
And that’s the one thing that Day One did for me is it says, hey, do you want to see what happened on this day for the last 10 years?
And so I can write, I mean, I can open the app in Day One and I can just look through and say, hey, on this day 10 years ago we were doing this, and nine years ago we were doing this.
And, you know, that’s a pretty cool thing to do.
Of course, I don’t know how the Apple Journal app is going to do that, but I don’t even know.
I don’t know what the expectation is.
I don’t know that they’ve even said anything.
And it’s going to take me a long time to decide.
I haven’t tried to import anything, and I’m not sure that they even have that.
I’ve just started.
And so over time we’ll see how it goes, and I’ll be able to report back.
But at the moment I like the simplicity, I like the idea.
It does prompt me to record every evening, and I continue to journal even though I’m not doing it in Day One.
That is all I have for today.
If you have any comments or suggestions, you can send them to me at technologybytesatmerigfamily.com.
Thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes Microcast.
I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
