Diary

Journalistic

A fast micro journal app that is easy to use, intuitive, and very well thought out but no markdown support or image attachments.

Stone

Jan 13, 2024 • 4 min read

Happy New Year and welcome to episode #109 in this hobby gone wild! Before telling you about the app I tested, a quick welcome to some new followers:

💡

Welcome to Ila from Kazakhstan, sdf from Canada, BL from Israel, Jorem from Germany, Rado from The Netherlands, Elixon from Venezuela, Marisa from Portugal, and Thiago from Brazil.

Thank you all for signing up to this, what used to be a weekly but now every few weeks, silly adventure of mine. Thanks also to Gudjon for reaching out and for your kind words that motivated to post this weekend. OK, onto the app.

Journalistic is not really for note-taking but more for a journal. It's built as a Progressive Web App (PWA) which means that it is uses your Web browser's storage which could be a challenge if you clear your cache. Just make sure you have your notes exported every so often and on multiple devices.

The app was first released in Nov, 2019 and runs on Android, iOS, or your Desktop. It supports all of those platforms because it's a PWA. For nerds like me: from what I can tell it is developed with Nuxt, Vue, and Vite.

A micro journal is a bullet journal with focus on a minimalistic writing style.

Just like the Diaro, Journey, DayOne, Diarium, and Diary, this app is primarily for maintaining a daily journal. It doesn't have all of the features that some of those apps have which is likely intentional. Noticeably missing are support for image attachments and audio recording which I think would be important.

Even without those features, Journalistic is very good. It's really fast and the user interface is extremely well thought out. Each day you can add bullet points about your day, a dream that you had, an idea that popped into your head, or wise thoughts (aka Wisdom). If you don't want to track those, you can disable the specific feature(s) under Settings.

Check out the ingenious way the circles around the days are designed. As you add more items on a given day the circle's border is broken down into lines with a color representing the number of items of a specific type, e.g. yellow for dream and red for memorable items that were "hearted".

The fun part are the statistics. I loved the idea of a "Wisdom distribution chart" and really liked how you can like ❤️ individual bullets and those show up as highlights on a "Reflect" page where you also see wisdom and ideas.

Searching across days is very quick and you can quick filter by notes, highlights, ideas, dreams, people, wisdom.

The developer looks to be working on interesting features including an AI-based feature called Freud and another one for wellness called Davinci:

The DaVinci project will explore how data from bio sensors (Apple Watch, Ōura Ring, Fitbit, etc.) can be used to determine how sleep and physical activity affect the state of mind: mood, energy, stress, aso.

You are not locked in since you can download all of your notes to text, JSON, or Markdown. I couldn't see a way to share individual notes which, I guess, makes sense if it's a private journal.

Journalistic supports a Guinea pig mode where you can try out pre-release features. You can also try the Pro features for free but at some point in the future, you will need to pay. Pro costs $4.90 a month which means one less coffee a month for one great app all month 😂.

Read on for the ugly, the bad, the good, the great, and the awesome aspects of Journalistic.

Ugly

Not inline editing: every time you type a bullet it displays a blank page for you to write ✍️
No attachments or inline images
Not offline (yet)

Bad

Can't export or share a specific day or note
When clicking on a day it prompts if you want to create an entry instead of just creating it
Cannot create entries for future dates
No Markdown support on input
Thoughts don't show up in timeline view?
Some pages have checkbox or save icon or back button, wish they were all the same
Requires an account
No text formatting
No check-boxes
No linking of notes
No audio recording

Good

Tags
7 font sizes
1 font style
Bullet list in the journal but not in Notes
Hyperlinks
Spell checking
Dark mode
In a note you can have multiple lines but it's not Markdown, dang!

Great

Fast
Nice and clean
Free
Quick filter by notes, highlights, ideas, dreams, people, wisdom.
Groups of tags
Easy to switch switch between days
Autocomplete for tags and people
You can disable features you don't use or need
Download as Markdown, text, or JSON
Detailed change log
Insights with stats
People and groups of people
@mention people
Search in a note - using browser search
Search across notes

Awesome

Really cool dates with dashes indicating number of entries on that day
Highlight (❤️) bullets and then filter them across all dates
Throwbacks to what happened in the past
GitHub style frequency graph
Auto mentioning to find people in entries
Great documentation and help
DaVinci Ōura integration being worked on?

Almost the end

Thank you again for reading my reviews. I enjoy testing the apps and it's cool if it can help someone out there.

Journalistic is a very well designed and fast micro journal app that's easy to use, intuitive, and very well thought out but it does not support Markdown for input, image attachments, or many of the features in a note taking app. That's cool because it's a journal app!

That's it for this instance.

All the best to you and yours in 2024 from me and mine and have a great note-taking week ahead!