The Journaling App: A Game-Changer for Non-Journalers Like Me

As I walked my dog and quickly submitted a journal entry, I couldn't help but think about how much I've been missing out on by not journaling before. The idea of taking some time to reflect on my day, thoughts, and feelings has always seemed daunting, but the journaling app from Apple has changed that for me.

I've never been one to journal or keep a record of my thoughts and feelings. In fact, I've always thought that journaling was something that only certain people did, and it wasn't really for me. But after discovering the journaling app on my iPhone, I decided to give it a try. And let me tell you, it's been a game-changer.

The best part about this app is how easy it is to use. It's incredibly simple, with a minimalistic design that makes it easy to focus on your thoughts and feelings. The app allows you to submit journal entries quickly and easily, without having to think too much about what to write or how to structure your entry. In fact, the app does most of the work for you, providing suggestions and prompts to help get you started.

The journaling app is also incredibly powerful, allowing you to save photos and videos from within the app and import them into your Photos app. This feature has been a game-changer for me, as it allows me to document my thoughts and feelings in a more visual way. I can take a photo or video that summarizes my entry, and then save it along with my written thoughts.

One of the things I love most about this app is how it makes journaling accessible to anyone, regardless of their experience level. The app has no paid service or subscription fees, making it free for everyone who wants to try it out. And because it's tied to your iCloud account, you can access your journals from any device with an internet connection.

The only other feature that caught my attention was the ability to add a title to your journal entry. This is something that I never thought about before, but now that I'm using the app, I realize how important it is. Adding a title helps me quickly identify which entry is which, and makes it easier to find specific entries when I need them.

Overall, I've been absolutely loving the experience of using this journaling app. It's helped me develop a habit of journaling that I never thought I'd get into, and has provided me with a valuable tool for reflecting on my thoughts and feelings. Whether you're a seasoned journaler or just starting out, I highly recommend giving this app a try.

To make the most of the journaling app, it's all about simplicity. The app does 80-90% of the work for you, leaving only a small amount of writing to do at the end. This means that even if you're not in the mood to write a lot, you can still benefit from using the app. And because it's so easy to use, I've found myself looking forward to submitting journal entries every day.

One thing I did notice was that there are other journaling apps available, such as Day One and One Day. While these apps have more features and are a bit more robust than the Apple journaling app, I think they're not necessary for most people. The Apple app is more than enough to get started with journaling, and it's free.

In conclusion, I've been thoroughly impressed with the journaling app from Apple. It's made me realize how much I was missing out on by not journaling before, and has provided me with a valuable tool for reflecting on my thoughts and feelings. Whether you're a seasoned journaler or just starting out, I highly recommend giving this app a try.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso alongside iOS 17.2 which Apple released a couple weeks ago the Apple journal app was finally released to all iOS 17.2 updates and the journal app honestly I've been very pleasantly surprised and this is coming from somebody who's never really drling in their life both physically or digitally like I've never really even thought about journaling I've definitely heard about it and I see the positives of it but this journal app has really kind of opened my eyes as to what journaling is and how easy it can be and it really lower the barrier of Entry to really get started in the journaling kind of experience and uh initiative that you want to so in this video I just want to give you guys my twoe kind of review and my hands-on experience on the journal application itself I'll give you guys a walk through of exactly what it entails and then also give you guys My overall experience and why I think the journal app is great for those people like myself who have zero who have little to no experience journaling so let's get into the video all right everyone let's get right into this video and the first thing you need to know is that with the journal application you need to be on iOS 17.2 so if you're on any iPhone it will will work as long as it supports 17.2 just something to take into consideration and as of right now it's only on iOS so there is no Mac OS version of this app there is no iPad OS version of this app it's only available on iPhone which it's kind of sad cuz I do wish it came out on the iPad since there was such a big canvas on it but maybe eventually it will come out maybe in you know iPad OS 18 like apple likes to do now when you open up the application what I want to do is go through a little bit of a walk through on how to actually use it because it's very very simple there aren't many options to take advantage of so once you learn these few options it'll be very easy to kind of get this going so this is the homepage and this is what you get greeted with when you do open the journals application and as you can see there isn't much to do right you can scroll through your feed which is all Journal postings that you've made over the past couple days or weeks it's pretty much just a running chronological list which you can change but it is defaulted by a chronological list of posts and then you have your main plus button down here which is to create a new post which we'll touch on in a little bit and then you have your filtering options which is all entries entries have photos videos music activity Reflections and then places as well because as you can see there is different forms of media that you can kind of put into a journal post but to walk you guys through what a journal entry looks like again what I love about this application I'm going to give you guys some anecdotal information is I love that it makes it very easy to actually Journal right because as I've mentioned before I'm not a journal art I've never journaled not that I had anything against it it was just something that I didn't really think about doing ever I know that there's a lot of people that like to do it and it's great for mental health and mental awareness and keeping a positive mindset and I see the benefit of journaling but again for me the barrier to entry was too high even if it is as simple as a pen and paper and remembering to write something down or you know taking 5 minutes out of my day versus here all you do is you press the plus button and you do have suggestions kind of built into here which we'll touch on in a second because you can turn this off if you really want to but I highly highly recommend leaving the recommended suggestions on because it gets you 80 to 90% of the way there in terms of what your journal entry can be so for instance these are some journal entries that are being suggested so afternoon walk on Saturday it lets you know that hey you have an activity that was walking it gives you it lets you know where you did it so this is an example of a journal post we have some photos lets you know that you walked for almost 4,000 steps lets you know where you were with the location shows you some videos some pictures that you took on that day and then you can start writing or save without writing so you can literally save it as is so you don't even have to do anything all you have to do is all you have to do is make sure that you want these photos and videos that are in here maybe if you want to rename it which is kind of surprising how weird and bad this UI is I thought Apple would give us a better UI but again you can rename the title and then if you just want to leave like this you can just press save without writing but if you want to start writing and write a little bit about it it's going to populate all these images and media write down exactly you want and then what you can do on the top right right here in the three dots you can actually have this entry saved as the day that you actually submitted this entry so for this day is January 2nd or the day that it was at the actual moment of this entry so the moment that these pictures and videos were taken or you can completely do a custom date if you want to back date this for some reason or you can even delete it from here but again you write whatever you want and then you're good to go and you can even have more photos and more suggestions and then you can add photos and add videos and even add some audio and add location which is something that I don't really do the audio part too much but I might start doing it but this is exactly what a journal entry looks like and then you can even bookmark it so it's easier to find later on so I'll press done here and then you can see that it's right there as your next chronological journal entry submitted January 2nd afternoon walk and then from here if you do want to pin it you can pin it on the left or a bookmark it or you can delete it or edit it I'm going to delete it because this isn't one that I want on here maybe I'll do one in the future but that is an example of how to create a journal entry and then you also have the ability to add the plus button in terms of different types of actual journal entries right so for instance if you scroll through here you have a reflection question so review your recent memories write about something that made you smile and why so this is just a suggestion that apple and iOS gives to you and again everything is fully encrypted everything has the same encryption as iMessage and iCloud so this is saved on device it doesn't go to the cloud Apple isn't learning anything about you so they say I mean take that with a grain of salt but I believe them so this is all on device and it's not like you're giving more personal information to Apple that they can then take advantage of and then you know maybe spit ads to you or something like that but that is something to take into consideration and if you want to start from complete scratch all you have to do is press that plus button again and then just write in new entry and then you can just start from scratch maybe you have a thought that you want to put down or a note or whatever the case may be or maybe there's a specific moment that you want to put in there a specific picture you can do that as well and same thing applies with the dots and the bookmarking and then you press done and then you're good to go but again it's that simple and that is why I love this again I was not a journaler and now with this I am a journaler or at least I'm journaling on the journal app because it's so easy and then I like to go back in here and just kind of look at the memories right like it's very cool to just click in here look at all the photos that were being taken right a nice little memory where you were you know some photos that were taken it's very cool to just kind of look back and see exactly what you did that day especially you know when you have kids and you want to get nostalgic and you know kids grow up so fast that you want to be able to keep those memories and maybe you know for instance my daughter was sick this day but I was also I had to work so I couldn't really take care of her that much so my wife had to take care of her and I felt like I was missing out so different ways to kind of go back and almost re-experience what you already went through which is awesome and then also you have something like this which is an auto kind of recommended suggestion journal app which is hey I did an activity I went on an outdoor run I listen to the waveform podcast is a 5 and a half mile run you can click in here to get some information and what I do wish they had was I wish that if you clicked on one of these you had the ability to then maybe tap on this again and then it would take you to your activities app or if you clicked on this it would take you to Spotify or apple music and if you clicked on this I wish it would take you to Apple podcast to actually go to this podcast maybe finish it if you hadn't finished it yet and there is an SDK for third party developers so if you are a third party developer you will be able to then tie into this recommendation kind of formula or engine to be able ble to get recommendations on third party applications like Spotify or like a Google Maps things like that but for right now it is only on Native applications from what I've seen so far and now one more thing I did want to touch on with the journal application is the actual settings themselves because as as you guys saw the journal app doesn't have too many options but for good reason but if you go into the journal application mine might look a little bit different than yours because I am on 17.3 beta 1 but 17.2 is very familiar and very similar but you have your kind of normal J know settings in terms of location data and photos with private access ability to to check your camera and things like that but you also have some other abilities in here so you have skip journaling suggestions again unless you want to just journal from scratch and that's what you want to do I recommend leaving this turned off because if you turn this on then all the suggestions that we had on the previous one so if I want to press plus here no suggestions show up and it takes you directly into this blank canvas which to some people they want that others like myself I want to keep this turned off because I want those suggestions and then also you can lock your journal app with your iPhone passcode so if you turn this on I'll walk you guys through what it looks like it'll tell you that you want to lock it after you input your actual code and then you can require your passcode after 1 minute or whatever the case may be 51 15 I like to leave it unlocked because you know I don't have a reason to keep it locked for whatever the case may be but that is what it is and then you also have a notification journaling schedule so I have mine set for Sunday Tuesday and Thursday just as a little reminder to maybe hey take a second even while you're walking your dog or whatever and quickly submit a journal entry because it's only going to be a positive thing it's kind of like that saying where you know people never regret going to the gym no matter how badly they don't want to go to the gym same kind of idea applies here it's like maybe sometimes I don't want to write anything or sometimes I don't really care to go into the app but after I actually submit a journal entry then I'm happy about it because then I can go back a week or two weeks later and be like a that was nice that I was able to kind of uh leave a memory or be able to kind of go back and check on that so the journal app has been great so far and then you have the ability to save photos and videos taken inside of the journal to your photos app because like you guys saw if I go into this journal entry and press on the camera right here and I take a photo it'll only live in the journal app unless I press this button right here which will then save it also to your camera roll very similar to how iMessage does it where if you take a picture in your iMessage it'll SA into your camera rooll after you send it out but that is a journaling app and I've just been loving the experience as a again I'm a non- journaler I've never journaled before in my entire life never personally saw a big benefit in it in terms of the amount of time it takes versus what you get out of it but this has been absolutely perfect for a person like me but again the simpler the better in my opinion when it comes to something like journaling because the smaller the barrier to entry is the easier it's going to be to get that journal entry done and the better you're going to feel about it after you are done with that journal entry so again it gets you 80 to 90% of the way there in terms of getting that journal entry completed with these journal entry suggestions and then you just finish it off with a couple words maybe a little sentence or two to remember why exactly you're writing that journal entry and then you're done so journal entry I highly recommend if you're not somebody that journals at all jump into this one because again it's a native app it's included in your phone it's built into your phone if you have 17.2 and if you don't like it you just delete it there's no paid service or anything like that and it is tied to your iCloud so it'll be picked up on any new iPhone or any other iPhone after the fact but let's get out of this View and finish up the video so that will just about do it for this video everybody as you can see with the journal application itself again I have no other Journal application I've ever used and I've heard that there's an app called day one or one day I believe it's called that has a lot more features and is a little bit more robust and I'm definitely going to start to try those out just to kind of get a level setting ground as to what to expect from journaling applications moving forward but the journal app from Apple is again the lowest barrier of Entry to get you started in the journaling world and having that sort of initiative to get started because like I mentioned earlier about 80 to 90% of the journal entry is done for you already all you have to do is kind of like write a couple words in there title it and then just press submit and then you're all journaled up and ready to go and I have seen it as an overall net positive in my day-to-day so it's just been my two cents with the journal application I absolutely love it if you're somebody like me that's never Journal before and wants to try it out this is going to be the easiest way to do it because the second you update a 17.2 is just going to show up on your home screen and you can use it or delete it it's totally up to you but that's going to do it for this video Everybody let me know a comment Down Below have you tried the journaling app are you an experienced journal or have you been doing it for a while are you somebody like myself that's just recently started because of the journaling app very curious to know what everybody's experience has been like but overall I think the journal app is definitely one of the bigger sleeper features and applications Apple's released in the recent years because I'm absolutely in love with it but that's going to do it for this video Everybody if you guys want to watch more iOS iPad Os or Mac OS videos click on one of these right here but until next time I'm Fernando and I'm out of you everybody peace leave a little dolphin in the comments down below tooso alongside iOS 17.2 which Apple released a couple weeks ago the Apple journal app was finally released to all iOS 17.2 updates and the journal app honestly I've been very pleasantly surprised and this is coming from somebody who's never really drling in their life both physically or digitally like I've never really even thought about journaling I've definitely heard about it and I see the positives of it but this journal app has really kind of opened my eyes as to what journaling is and how easy it can be and it really lower the barrier of Entry to really get started in the journaling kind of experience and uh initiative that you want to so in this video I just want to give you guys my twoe kind of review and my hands-on experience on the journal application itself I'll give you guys a walk through of exactly what it entails and then also give you guys My overall experience and why I think the journal app is great for those people like myself who have zero who have little to no experience journaling so let's get into the video all right everyone let's get right into this video and the first thing you need to know is that with the journal application you need to be on iOS 17.2 so if you're on any iPhone it will will work as long as it supports 17.2 just something to take into consideration and as of right now it's only on iOS so there is no Mac OS version of this app there is no iPad OS version of this app it's only available on iPhone which it's kind of sad cuz I do wish it came out on the iPad since there was such a big canvas on it but maybe eventually it will come out maybe in you know iPad OS 18 like apple likes to do now when you open up the application what I want to do is go through a little bit of a walk through on how to actually use it because it's very very simple there aren't many options to take advantage of so once you learn these few options it'll be very easy to kind of get this going so this is the homepage and this is what you get greeted with when you do open the journals application and as you can see there isn't much to do right you can scroll through your feed which is all Journal postings that you've made over the past couple days or weeks it's pretty much just a running chronological list which you can change but it is defaulted by a chronological list of posts and then you have your main plus button down here which is to create a new post which we'll touch on in a little bit and then you have your filtering options which is all entries entries have photos videos music activity Reflections and then places as well because as you can see there is different forms of media that you can kind of put into a journal post but to walk you guys through what a journal entry looks like again what I love about this application I'm going to give you guys some anecdotal information is I love that it makes it very easy to actually Journal right because as I've mentioned before I'm not a journal art I've never journaled not that I had anything against it it was just something that I didn't really think about doing ever I know that there's a lot of people that like to do it and it's great for mental health and mental awareness and keeping a positive mindset and I see the benefit of journaling but again for me the barrier to entry was too high even if it is as simple as a pen and paper and remembering to write something down or you know taking 5 minutes out of my day versus here all you do is you press the plus button and you do have suggestions kind of built into here which we'll touch on in a second because you can turn this off if you really want to but I highly highly recommend leaving the recommended suggestions on because it gets you 80 to 90% of the way there in terms of what your journal entry can be so for instance these are some journal entries that are being suggested so afternoon walk on Saturday it lets you know that hey you have an activity that was walking it gives you it lets you know where you did it so this is an example of a journal post we have some photos lets you know that you walked for almost 4,000 steps lets you know where you were with the location shows you some videos some pictures that you took on that day and then you can start writing or save without writing so you can literally save it as is so you don't even have to do anything all you have to do is all you have to do is make sure that you want these photos and videos that are in here maybe if you want to rename it which is kind of surprising how weird and bad this UI is I thought Apple would give us a better UI but again you can rename the title and then if you just want to leave like this you can just press save without writing but if you want to start writing and write a little bit about it it's going to populate all these images and media write down exactly you want and then what you can do on the top right right here in the three dots you can actually have this entry saved as the day that you actually submitted this entry so for this day is January 2nd or the day that it was at the actual moment of this entry so the moment that these pictures and videos were taken or you can completely do a custom date if you want to back date this for some reason or you can even delete it from here but again you write whatever you want and then you're good to go and you can even have more photos and more suggestions and then you can add photos and add videos and even add some audio and add location which is something that I don't really do the audio part too much but I might start doing it but this is exactly what a journal entry looks like and then you can even bookmark it so it's easier to find later on so I'll press done here and then you can see that it's right there as your next chronological journal entry submitted January 2nd afternoon walk and then from here if you do want to pin it you can pin it on the left or a bookmark it or you can delete it or edit it I'm going to delete it because this isn't one that I want on here maybe I'll do one in the future but that is an example of how to create a journal entry and then you also have the ability to add the plus button in terms of different types of actual journal entries right so for instance if you scroll through here you have a reflection question so review your recent memories write about something that made you smile and why so this is just a suggestion that apple and iOS gives to you and again everything is fully encrypted everything has the same encryption as iMessage and iCloud so this is saved on device it doesn't go to the cloud Apple isn't learning anything about you so they say I mean take that with a grain of salt but I believe them so this is all on device and it's not like you're giving more personal information to Apple that they can then take advantage of and then you know maybe spit ads to you or something like that but that is something to take into consideration and if you want to start from complete scratch all you have to do is press that plus button again and then just write in new entry and then you can just start from scratch maybe you have a thought that you want to put down or a note or whatever the case may be or maybe there's a specific moment that you want to put in there a specific picture you can do that as well and same thing applies with the dots and the bookmarking and then you press done and then you're good to go but again it's that simple and that is why I love this again I was not a journaler and now with this I am a journaler or at least I'm journaling on the journal app because it's so easy and then I like to go back in here and just kind of look at the memories right like it's very cool to just click in here look at all the photos that were being taken right a nice little memory where you were you know some photos that were taken it's very cool to just kind of look back and see exactly what you did that day especially you know when you have kids and you want to get nostalgic and you know kids grow up so fast that you want to be able to keep those memories and maybe you know for instance my daughter was sick this day but I was also I had to work so I couldn't really take care of her that much so my wife had to take care of her and I felt like I was missing out so different ways to kind of go back and almost re-experience what you already went through which is awesome and then also you have something like this which is an auto kind of recommended suggestion journal app which is hey I did an activity I went on an outdoor run I listen to the waveform podcast is a 5 and a half mile run you can click in here to get some information and what I do wish they had was I wish that if you clicked on one of these you had the ability to then maybe tap on this again and then it would take you to your activities app or if you clicked on this it would take you to Spotify or apple music and if you clicked on this I wish it would take you to Apple podcast to actually go to this podcast maybe finish it if you hadn't finished it yet and there is an SDK for third party developers so if you are a third party developer you will be able to then tie into this recommendation kind of formula or engine to be able ble to get recommendations on third party applications like Spotify or like a Google Maps things like that but for right now it is only on Native applications from what I've seen so far and now one more thing I did want to touch on with the journal application is the actual settings themselves because as as you guys saw the journal app doesn't have too many options but for good reason but if you go into the journal application mine might look a little bit different than yours because I am on 17.3 beta 1 but 17.2 is very familiar and very similar but you have your kind of normal J know settings in terms of location data and photos with private access ability to to check your camera and things like that but you also have some other abilities in here so you have skip journaling suggestions again unless you want to just journal from scratch and that's what you want to do I recommend leaving this turned off because if you turn this on then all the suggestions that we had on the previous one so if I want to press plus here no suggestions show up and it takes you directly into this blank canvas which to some people they want that others like myself I want to keep this turned off because I want those suggestions and then also you can lock your journal app with your iPhone passcode so if you turn this on I'll walk you guys through what it looks like it'll tell you that you want to lock it after you input your actual code and then you can require your passcode after 1 minute or whatever the case may be 51 15 I like to leave it unlocked because you know I don't have a reason to keep it locked for whatever the case may be but that is what it is and then you also have a notification journaling schedule so I have mine set for Sunday Tuesday and Thursday just as a little reminder to maybe hey take a second even while you're walking your dog or whatever and quickly submit a journal entry because it's only going to be a positive thing it's kind of like that saying where you know people never regret going to the gym no matter how badly they don't want to go to the gym same kind of idea applies here it's like maybe sometimes I don't want to write anything or sometimes I don't really care to go into the app but after I actually submit a journal entry then I'm happy about it because then I can go back a week or two weeks later and be like a that was nice that I was able to kind of uh leave a memory or be able to kind of go back and check on that so the journal app has been great so far and then you have the ability to save photos and videos taken inside of the journal to your photos app because like you guys saw if I go into this journal entry and press on the camera right here and I take a photo it'll only live in the journal app unless I press this button right here which will then save it also to your camera roll very similar to how iMessage does it where if you take a picture in your iMessage it'll SA into your camera rooll after you send it out but that is a journaling app and I've just been loving the experience as a again I'm a non- journaler I've never journaled before in my entire life never personally saw a big benefit in it in terms of the amount of time it takes versus what you get out of it but this has been absolutely perfect for a person like me but again the simpler the better in my opinion when it comes to something like journaling because the smaller the barrier to entry is the easier it's going to be to get that journal entry done and the better you're going to feel about it after you are done with that journal entry so again it gets you 80 to 90% of the way there in terms of getting that journal entry completed with these journal entry suggestions and then you just finish it off with a couple words maybe a little sentence or two to remember why exactly you're writing that journal entry and then you're done so journal entry I highly recommend if you're not somebody that journals at all jump into this one because again it's a native app it's included in your phone it's built into your phone if you have 17.2 and if you don't like it you just delete it there's no paid service or anything like that and it is tied to your iCloud so it'll be picked up on any new iPhone or any other iPhone after the fact but let's get out of this View and finish up the video so that will just about do it for this video everybody as you can see with the journal application itself again I have no other Journal application I've ever used and I've heard that there's an app called day one or one day I believe it's called that has a lot more features and is a little bit more robust and I'm definitely going to start to try those out just to kind of get a level setting ground as to what to expect from journaling applications moving forward but the journal app from Apple is again the lowest barrier of Entry to get you started in the journaling world and having that sort of initiative to get started because like I mentioned earlier about 80 to 90% of the journal entry is done for you already all you have to do is kind of like write a couple words in there title it and then just press submit and then you're all journaled up and ready to go and I have seen it as an overall net positive in my day-to-day so it's just been my two cents with the journal application I absolutely love it if you're somebody like me that's never Journal before and wants to try it out this is going to be the easiest way to do it because the second you update a 17.2 is just going to show up on your home screen and you can use it or delete it it's totally up to you but that's going to do it for this video Everybody let me know a comment Down Below have you tried the journaling app are you an experienced journal or have you been doing it for a while are you somebody like myself that's just recently started because of the journaling app very curious to know what everybody's experience has been like but overall I think the journal app is definitely one of the bigger sleeper features and applications Apple's released in the recent years because I'm absolutely in love with it but that's going to do it for this video Everybody if you guys want to watch more iOS iPad Os or Mac OS videos click on one of these right here but until next time I'm Fernando and I'm out of you everybody peace leave a little dolphin in the comments down below too\n"