If you’ve been around Irreal for as little as a year and a half, you know that my most important and most used iOS app is Journelly. I use it as my memo book to record my daily activities and random things that I want to remember. For example, if I see some article or ad in my browser, I can ask Safari to share it with Journelly and a Journelly entry is automatically made complete with a link to whatever it was I wanted to capture. Each entry contains a date/time stamp as well as the location of where the entry was made.
Best of all, Journelly keeps its data as an Org file so I can query or edit it in Emacs. Of course, Journelly has a search function but sometimes I want to do a more complicated search or even to just count the number of entries in the database (4361 as of right now). Having the database as an Org file means that my data is available on all my devices, even if that device is a Mac.
I’ve been using Journelly since March 2025, ever since it was in beta, and have never looked back. Lately, however, it’s been getting a bit laggy, something I put down to my large database. I was on the verge of truncating my active data to the most recent entries in order to improve performance when Álvaro Ramírez pushed a new beta—v1.5(4)—that completely solved the problem. Now Journelly performs just like it did when I started.
If you are an Emacs user and are using an iPhone/iPad, I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t want to use Journelly. It allows you to integrate your day-to-day note taking with the power of Org mode. Even if you aren’t an Emacs user, you’ll probably find Journelly useful. It can also save its data as a markdown file so you can still get all the benefits of an easily accessible and editable database even if you prefer another editor.