Day One Journal

Record your daily thoughts.

In the year since we reviewed journalling app Day One Journal, it’s acquired several new features that may persuade you to give it a try – or to upgrade to premium if you’re still using the basic version.

Top of the list of new features in version 5 is a Today view that redesigns the Activity Feed. It pulls together location, calendar, events, photos taken, entries for the day and those for On this Day, giving you a quick overview of any day. To access it, you simply tap a date, either in the calendar or timeline, or tap Today in the side menu.

Version 5 also gets a new media picker that allows you to zoom in on photos and videos, toggle between your photo library and the camera, and organises photos by location and time of day.

There’s also a redesigned PDF exporter. And you can now give a location any name you like and the location will be renamed throughout the app, including in previous journal entries. And the iPad version gets new keyboard shortcuts – particularly useful if you tend to use your iPad with an external keyboard.

Since we last reviewed it, in updates to version 4, Day One Journal has also gained a templates gallery and daily prompts to help you get started writing. In fact, a number of new features have been added regularly throughout the last year. But limitations on video import remain; 1080p or lower resolution and less than three minutes.

Day One Journal now provides daily prompts to help you get started with the day’s entries.

Solid additions

Day One Journal is fun to use, but we wish the new zoom tool in the media picker was more fluid rather than stepping between three size options. And performance felt a little sluggish on our iPhone XR running iOS 14. We like the way it plays nicely with other apps and services, though, such as the ability to share entries using Share Sheets or import files from the Files app as attachments.

These are solid additions to what was already a good journalling tool. However, it’s unlikely that anyone who hasn’t already been tempted to pay for the premium version ($55.99) will change their mind or that those who haven’t given Day One a go will do so on the basis of this version. KENNY HEMPHILL

A solid yet uninspiring update for existing users, but it’s unlikely to attract many new ones.