App Smart: Daily Journal Writing Without the Inconvenience - App Smart

One problem was that I didn’t always have my journal with me when I had the thought I wanted to jot down.

But now diary or journal writing is easier than ever, because, you guessed it, you can do it on a mobile device.

In my home, the journaling app of choice is Day! — The Best Story of Mine, $1 on iOS. It’s visually appealing, and it gets you into regular writing by providing short text entries with an emphasis on icons.

Tapping a date on the app’s calendar lets you write a new entry or edit an existing one. The writing page is simplicity itself — a blank slate with a small row of icons at the top — which, in my mind, removes some of the fuss and barriers to putting your words down. You simply type on the screen’s keyboard, and you can choose your font by tapping an icon at the top.

What makes Day more attractive than some other diary apps are the functions of the other icons on the menu. With a tap, you can set the background color of the page to match your mood, or perhaps to indicate something significant that happened that day. You can affix a photo, a simple weather icon or a symbolic icon, like a smiley face or birthday cake, from the app’s list.

These icons are displayed when you view your diary entries as a calendar, so you can get a visual reminder at a glance of what each month contains. The background colors appear as a similar visual cue when you view your entries as a list.

The app is password-protectable, and you can export journal data through iTunes, Dropbox or in an e-mail. The app’s main drawback is that it allows just one entry a day, which may not be the way you like to keep a journal. Also, because it’s designed to be so simple, you can only add a single photo for an entry.

If you’re after a more sophisticated, perhaps more grown-up, journaling app, you may prefer Day One — Journal, $5 on iOS. While it, too, emphasizes simplicity, it does allow more than one entry a day.

The writing part of the app is a plain, empty page, with a row of tiny icons that let you tag a location, add weather data downloaded from the Internet, set the date and time, or tag an entry as a favorite.

Like Day, Day One lets you view your past entries in a visual way — either as a simple timeline, as a list of photos appended to the entries, on a calendar display or by whether the entries are marked as favorites. The graphics are mostly gray, so they don’t distract you from your writing; it has password protection; and you can share individual entries via e-mail or Twitter. You can also use entries to check in on Foursquare.

For a similarly formal-feeling journal app on Android, Diaro is a great, no-cost choice. It’s similar to Day One in some ways, but it has the added benefit that you can sort entries by color-coded category, like business or entertainment, and add your own tag words. These extra labels are helpful for viewing your journal entries by category or keyword, which might be of interest if, for example, you mix personal entries with work-related ones.

An alternative free app with a prettier visual design is Memoires: The Diary. It’s just as sophisticated as Diaro, and it has a few extra features that may attract you. For example, you can append a mood icon to an entry, display entries on a map and even record audio clips to add to an entry.

Memoires also lets you organize previous journal entries in a “flow of thoughts” style. Here, you tap on entries and link one to another, flowing from one event, thought or mood to the next.

This may be useful if, for example, you want to link separate entries from a vacation or release your inner James Joyce. The app is more complex than Diaro, however, and that may discourage you from getting into the daily habit.

With so many free and low-cost options for your phone or tablet, there’s no excuse for letting the past slip away.

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