Over at The Art Of Not Asking Why, JTR suspects that I may be an apostate, or at least that I’m inconsistent. He notes, correctly, that I’m all in on Emacs in general and Org mode in particular, and yet I’ve lately expressed enthusiasm for the non-Emacs app Journelly. He wonders why. It’s a good question and an honest one that deserves an answer. I’m sure others are wondering too.
I explained my initial attraction in my first post on Journelly. The TL;DR is that I use the Apple Notes app to keep a running memo book of each day’s events but that I was looking for something a bit better. Journelly seemed like it might be an answer so I resolved to keep an eye on it. Shortly afterwards, Ramírez started a formal beta program and after some initial dithering I signed up and started playing with Journelly.
I will shortly write about my experiences with it but in this post I want to address why a dedicated Emacs/Org mode user, who writes virtually everything in Org mode, might want to use Journelly. The thing is even I am not always on my computer. Sometimes I’m out and about, and sometimes I’m just doing other things. That means that I’ll be using my iPhone. Apple’s policy prohibiting apps with interpreters means that Emacs will never be on iOS but even if it were, I can’t imagine that the experience would be very pleasant. What I need is a way of easily adding entries to my Memo Book and having those entries sync across all my devices, including my Mac.
That’s where Journelly shines. Although the beautiful iPhone display doesn’t suggest it, the records are actually recorded in standard Org mode. Since it’s also possible to store the Journelly files in the iCloud, you can get access to them with a Mac, iPad, or, I suppose, another iPhone.
Jack Baty has a nice post that describes how he’s sharing data between his iPhone and his Mac. He even has an Org template to capture entries on his Mac. It’s actually trivial and at this point I’m sharing Journelly data between my iPhone, Mac, and iPad.
Finally, Álvaro Ramírez also saw JTR’s post and wrote his own answer. The TL;DR there is, “Why not both?” Like me, he was looking for an easy way to take notes when he wasn’t at his computer but wanted to be able to access and edit them in Org mode as usual when he was. That’s why he arranged for the records to be kept in Org mode format.
Sure, as JTR says, there are apps like Beorg but they, while great, aren’t targeted at my—and presumably Ramírez’s—needs. It’s not a matter of choosing between Org and some proprietary app; it’s about choosing a useful Org front end for your iPhone.
As a coda to this post, JTR notes in a subsequent post that he didn’t realize that Journelly kept its records in Org format and now that he does, he better understands my attraction to it.