Yesterday, I explained why I think Journelly will be useful to me. Today, I want to follow up with my initial impressions of the app. As I wrote before, I recently signed up for the Journelly beta and have been experimenting with it for the last 5 days.
As yesterday’s post discussed, Journelly uses standard Org mode to store its data and can, optionally, store it in the iCloud. Those two things mean that’s it’s possible to share the data between devices. Currently, I am sharing data among my iPhone, my iPad, and my MacBook. The iPhone and iPad are accessing it with the Journelly app and the Mac is using Emacs Org mode. This is really powerful. I can capture data on any of my devices and it appears and is editable on all the others.
As for Journelly itself, I like it. A lot. It sort of reminds me of one of Ramírez’s other apps, scratch. It’s not that they do the same thing, it’s that they’re both simple to use and do exactly what you think they will. Ramírez is scratching an itch and doesn’t have any suits pushing him to add useless features or release things prematurely. Journelly is still in beta and has no documentation but its interface is so intuitive that I figured how do everything just by playing around with it.
There are buttons to add a check list, a plain list, or a photo. They work exactly like you think they should. If you’re at a restaurant and want to capture a picture of your meal, you simply push the camera button, which takes you to the camera app. After you take the photo, it pops you right back to Journelly with the picture displayed in the entry.
My initial plan was to experiment with Journelly for a while and maybe move my memo book functionality to it when it was actually released. The problem is, it’s so easy and pleasant to use that I want to start using it right now. Currently, I’m using both Journelly and Notes in parallel but that’s a real pain and I’ll definitely move to Journelly exclusively when it’s released. One thing for sure, it’s much easier to integrate it into my Emacs workflow than it has been to do the same with Notes.
This is a great app and if you want to capture data on your iPhone and be able to see and edit it on your Mac or other devices, you should definitely check it out.