Go ahead and open up the Day One app on your device and do a search for words such as “pandemic,” “unprecedented,” “social distancing,” and “coronavirus.” Our guess is that prior to February or March of 2020, this unique vocabulary was all but nonexistent. But if you’ve been journaling regularly this year, these words may now show up across your writing in unprecedented quantities.
Rather than a journal filled with photos and recaps from concerts, big family gatherings, and vacations, this year’s entries likely included talk of quarantine, layoffs, closures, and more. For us personally, our journals have proved therapeutic in a year that has been anything but. Sometimes there’s no one else but the blank pages of your journal to open up to about this bizarre world we’ve all been hurled into. It’s within the privacy and security of your journal that you can open up about your fears, anxieties, frustrations, hopes, and dissolution. There may never be a year quite like 2020 again (at least, we sure hope not!) and having a record of what your experience was like will prove to be a priceless history for yourself or others in the future.
We know everyone’s ready to put 2020 behind us, but before we do, we wanted to take one last look in the rearview mirror at some of Day One’s biggest updates and changes throughout the year.
- Daily Prompts. We believe a prompt a day keeps the writing block away. So in March, we added Daily Prompts to Day One on Mac and iOS. Every prompt may not apply to you or be something you want to answer, but we hope most get the writing wheels moving and help you get your thoughts down in your journal.
- The Today View. Previously called Activity Feed, Today aggregates five journal elements—your location data, calendar events, photos taken, the day’s entries, and On This Day entries—into one convenient place. You can read more about the Today View in our Version 5.0 blog post.
- Widgets in iOS 14 and Big Sur. Now you can interact with Day One right from your home screen.
- A Rebuilt PDF Exporter. This gives you more control over font sizes, excluding media if desired, etc.
- We fixed a pesky book printing issue that was affecting a number of our users. We apologize and are so glad this is no longer a pain point for us, or you.
- My Places! When you grant Day One location permission, it will automatically save the location of your journal entry. With My Places, you can name those locations to be something more personal than an address – Family Cabin, Lake Powell, etc.
- M1 support on Mac.
- Extended Free Trial Length on iOS to 14 days.
- New Safari Extension.
- Trackpad support on iPad.
- Sync Improvements.
To say that 2020 was a big year for iOS and Mac would be an understatement. The list above is just a small collection of the work our team put into the app across the Apple ecosystem. Now, let’s talk about Android for a minute. We know the Day One app on Android doesn’t have feature parity with iOS/Mac, which is frustrating for some users. We wish we could devote more time to Android, but our team is small and it’s a resource issue at this point. We’ve improved sync on Android this year and are still working on resolving other issues as we head into 2021.
As we sign off for the year, we want to thank you for supporting Day One. Your passion for journaling continues to push us to offer the best digital journaling experience in the world. Here’s to hoping for a better and brighter 2021.
Cheers, The Day One Team
(Photo by Long Truong on Unsplash)
