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Journelly is “Like tweeting, but for your eyes only.”
It takes a very particular set of features for a new app to impress me enough to hit the purchase button as fast as I did with Journelly. Especially one with a hefty price tag and no free preview!
The one-off fee of $22.99 Australian dollars felt more than fair.
Drafts has been retired from pride of place on my iPhone dock — never thought I’d see the day
Journelly is the first Org-powered app I’ve seen that lays out the welcome mat for people who don’t even know what Org is, never mind how to use it.
I recognise the power that Org can bring to my darling plain text, but I’m not ready to fall down the Org/Emacs rabbit hole.
A steep learning curve (plus a healthy fear of getting in too deep) has always been the largest barrier between me and anything resembling Org — until now.
Org-ignorant people can read the markup, because it actually makes sense — how cool!
At its simplest Org is human readable plain text, specially formatted so that apps like Emacs can do wonderful things with it. Fortunately, Journelly users don’t need to know anything about Org. And that is what excites me the most, because I know next to nothing about it!
Download the app, open the app, press the prominent blue +, and start typing. That’s what I call a low entry barrier to something built on a powerful geek-fueled engine.
Settings in Journelly let you choose between keeping your notes completely local, or syncing via iCloud (officially supported) or other cloud services (at your own risk).
I recommend turning on iCloud storage so you can access your notes on your Mac. Control-click the Journelly folder to choose the Keep Downloaded option. It’s a good idea to regularly export a zipped archive to another (version controlled) backup space.
You can format text in Journelly posts to be *bold*, /italic/, _underline_, +strike-through+, =verbatim=, or ~code~. I’ve noticed that you can’t begin a new line with bold formatted text as it returns the error “Org sub-headings are not currently supported”.
A Keyboard Maestro shortcut quickly opens my Journelly file when I’m on my laptop. From there I can add new entries and easily copy paste existing entries to other locations.
Hot tip: To keep sync working well, close the Journelly.org file on your Mac when not actively editing it there.
Journelly is still a very young app. It’s under active development by Álvaro R. of Xenodium, who created it for his own use and has stated that at least some of the features I would like to see are already on his radar.
Here’s what Journelly can’t currently do, that I wish it could:
Journelly may soon be compatible with Markdown, yay! If that is something you would like to see, Álvaro invites you to register your interest. The more requests he gets, the sooner Markdown support will come.
Ten days in with this app and I’m (joyfully) adding multiple daily entries. It’s similar to — but not the same as — the way I add notes to my One Big Text File (OBTF) and will no doubt shape the way I use it.
Prediction: OBTF continues to live in Obsidian and be my home base and starting point for longer form notes, while Journelly takes over as a low-friction space for personal journal entries. The two exist in parallel. (There are probably ways to feed one into the other, but I can’t see any reason to do that.)
I’m certainly enjoying journalling more (and actually doing it) now that it’s so quick and easy to access. And I’m not alone, though most of the positive reviews I’ve seen thus far are by people already well versed in the world of Emacs. I suspect that a trial period or freemium offer might tip the balance for more org-ignorant people to give Journelly a go.
Obsidian does the job but it’s significantly slower than Journelly to start up and get to where I want to be. That friction makes me less likely to record small thoughts.
Drafts used to solve that problem but for several interconnected, sync-related reasons, I found it was no longer the best way to add to Obsidian files on my mobile devices. See last week’s PTPL on the restrictions of using Obsidian Sync with a vault stored in Dropbox.
While Shortcuts might work as a quick entry point to Obsidian, I have to say there’s something very very nice about a one-trick pony that speaks my language. There’s also a high distraction risk with Obsidian that Journelly doesn’t have.
The Journelly app icon has already earned a place with the Blessed Four that appear on the dock of my iPhone screen. High praise indeed! Journelly deserves a solid 8 out of 10, and I look forward to seeing it get even better.
Next step in my journey to playing with Org without actually learning it, or opening Emacs: Beorg for task management. It’s going well so far, looking very much like it will replace todo.txt.
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