Punkt: One–sentence journal
A simple way to record your day
Free (IAPs) From Gregor Pichler, punktapp.me
Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 13.0 or later
Ever since the first cave dweller scrawled on a wall, humans have wanted to record our experiences. There are many journalling apps in the App Store, but few are as simple as Punkt.
In Punkt, you post one sentence to describe your day. You can tag it with a mood and assign it to a category so, for example, you might have felt awesome because you were with friends. You can link the entry to a Maps location, and if you’re a subscriber you can add photos too. Subscribing also enables you to edit your posts and make more than one post per day. If you wish, the app can remind you to post each day and can also put an inspirational quote in your notifications.
As you’d expect, tags and locations enable you to revisit content — so you can see your “happy places,” as
the app calls them, or revisit your “good times.” Tapping on a specific tag will show you the journal entries for that tag. It works well enough but there aren’t many tags — just five moods and eight categories — and you can’t create your own. So, for example, you can’t tag the concerts you go to as a separate category or have different tags for different groups of people: if you want to tag something you’ve done with somebody else the only available tags are family, friends, relationship, or work.
In addition to your journal entries, Punkt also enables you to see statistics: how many words you’ve posted, how many consecutive days you’ve posted, and how frequently you’ve used specific mood tags. If you used the most cheerful tag on Monday but a less cheerful one on Tuesday, you’ll see a graph portraying your mood dipping. Underneath the graph you’ll then see the influences on your week, which gives you a percentage breakdown of the categories you’ve tagged your post with. If half of your posts are tagged Friends and half Food, it’ll tell you that your week was 50% influenced by friends and 50% influenced by food. We’re not sure that’s an actionable insight, but your mileage may vary.
Punkt is attractive, secure (protect it with Touch ID or Face ID), and easy. But its simplicity may be its weak point — a lack of customizable tags means it may be too limited for some.
THE BOTTOM LINE. Simple, attractive, and fun — but tagging is lacking.