Daylife Journal 3
A clear journaling tool that’s missing a companion iOS app
$39.99 (single user) Developer Chronos Inc, chronosnet.com Requirements OS X 10.11 or later, 50MB of available disk space
When it comes to quality lifestyle applications for the Mac, such as Greeting Card Shop, it’s hard to beat the folks at Chronos, but aside from a note-taking app that hasn’t been updated in three years, Chronos has all but neglected iOS. This omission becomes particularly noteworthy with the debut of Daylife.
What would normally be praised as a modestly capable desktop journaling solution must now endure closer scrutiny in the mobile age, since there’s no companion iOS app for creating entries on the go, or even syncing with other Macs.
Perhaps there will be such features someday, but in the meantime we’re left to compare Daylife as it exists today somewhat unfavorably against the leading Mac journal app, Day One – which not only has exceptional mobile versions, but also its own sync service to seamlessly unite those platforms.
Both Mac applications adhere to a similar triple-pane layout, with a background helper that allows users to quickly create new entries from the menu bar. Daylife adds a convenient weather and calendar dashboard for the current day, and we actually preferred the cleaner, more straightforward header design of the entries viewer, which includes buttons for importing photos and adding tags.
Daylife also has the upper hand when it comes to the number of journals you can create and how many photos can be added to each entry. Day One has artificial limits on each – a maximum of 10 in both cases – whereas Daylife can create or import an unlimited amount, as well as stack journals into subcategories for better organization. (For example, a journal called Family can include sub-journals for children or other members.)
We liked the way Daylife presents images in a scrolling horizontal grid across the top of each entry – that is, until we realized there was no way to open or Quick Look photos to get a closer look. Embedded date and location data is completely ignored, so entries have to be manually updated to reflect the correct information; new entries automatically include the current location, but there’s no way to edit the time once an entry is added.
the bottom line. There’s a lot to like about Daylife, but the lack of a companion mobile app keeps memories chained to the laptop/desktop where they were created.