**The Digital Diary App: A Tool for Self-Reflection and Organization**

As I embarked on testing Apple's new Journal app, I couldn't help but feel a mix of excitement and skepticism. What would it be like to have a digital diary that could guide me through my thoughts and emotions? The app promises to provide personalized suggestions and prompts to help you relive fond memories or work through challenging experiences.

**A Therapist Guiding Me**

The first thing I noticed was the ability to reset my perspectives. The app's gentle nudges helped me to reframe my thoughts and approach my day with a fresh mindset. It's like having a therapist guiding me, encouraging me to reflect on my actions and emotions in a healthy way. With Journal, I can explore my thoughts without fear of judgment, allowing me to work through difficult feelings and come out stronger on the other side.

**The Power of Nails Done Early**

One of the first surprises I encountered was how often the app assumed I had breakfast at a restaurant next door simply because I'd gotten my nails done early in the morning. While it's not perfect, I suppose it's okay if it's just meant to be a starting point for my little "dear diary" moment. The flexibility of Journal is reassuring, and I appreciate that there are no expectations or pressures to produce content.

**The App's Limitations**

However, there are some limitations to the app that may be frustrating for some users. For instance, video files need to be under 500 megabytes, which means a 2-minute video shot in 4K is not an option. This limitation could help save storage space on my iPhone, but it also means I won't be able to upload high-quality videos as easily. Additionally, entries are stored locally on my phone, which may lead to concerns about data security and privacy.

**The Disappointment of No Sharing**

One of the most surprising aspects of Journal is that there's no way to share any of these posts or search for specific entries. I'm not just talking about no searching – it's true; you can't even go back and look up a post from last week or scroll through your favorites. While this might be a blessing in disguise, as it removes the pressure to produce content for others' eyes, it also means I'll have to bookmark my favorite posts or rely on filtering by location to find what I'm looking for.

**Rethinking the Value of Writing**

As someone who's spent years writing about their memories and experiences, I have to admit that this experience has made me rethink the value of journaling. When I look at Journal, it feels like a classic Facebook post – something I'd share with friends or family, but never meant for anyone else's eyes. This realization has been both liberating and disconcerting, as I realize that my mental health is not dependent on social validation.

**Searching: A Lost Art**

The lack of searching in Journal is perhaps the most striking aspect of this app. While it's easy to scroll through your entries, there's no way to look up a specific post or retrieve old photos and audio files. This limitation forces me to rely on bookmarking my favorite posts or filtering by location to find what I'm looking for. In a world where searching is often the most convenient way to access information, it's jarring to realize that I won't be able to do so with Journal.

**A Year of Posts: A Digital Legacy**

The thought of creating over 100 posts in a single year has left me feeling both excited and intimidated. If I were to switch to Android or delete this app altogether, would I just discard my digital legacy? This concern highlights the complexity of embracing digital tools like Journal, where our reliance on technology can sometimes feel overwhelming.

**A Year with Journal: Initial Impressions**

Managing editor and iPhone reviewer Patrick Holland has been playing with Journal, and his initial impressions are both positive and thought-provoking. He's enjoyed the app so far but notes that it has a familiar, Apple-esque quality to it. While he hasn't had any prompts to relive specific memories, he appreciates how Journal can provide a space for emotions and thoughts.

**Creative Writing Exercises and The Artist Way**

For me, using Journal reminds me of analog experiences I've had with creative writing exercises or following The Artist's Way. These activities helped me cultivate mindfulness and introspection, which is exactly what Journal provides. By embracing digital journaling, I'm not sacrificing the benefits of traditional reflection; instead, I'm finding new ways to connect with my thoughts and emotions.

**Conclusion**

While there are certainly limitations to the Journal app, I believe it's worth trying, especially for those looking to improve their mental health or develop healthier relationships with technology. By embracing digital journaling, you may discover new tools for self-reflection and organization that can help you put time into perspective and prioritize what truly matters.

In the end, it's not about sharing your thoughts with others; it's about cultivating a deeper understanding of yourself. Journal is an invitation to explore your emotions, work through challenging experiences, and emerge stronger on the other side. As I continue to use this app, I'm reminded that sometimes, it's our digital reflections that can lead us back to ourselves.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhave you noticed that the iPhone has been trying to fix us this little screen in our pocket is keeping track of so many things in our life it's smart enough to give us suggestions and now a major selling point of the iPhone is how those suggestions can make you a better you go to sleep sooner change your display color at night so you can calm down would you like to take a moment to reflect on how you feel right now wait hold the phone back your eyes are too close to the screen and you know what your music is too loud but good job your screen time is is down this week would you like to do one more thing on this screen before you go to bed yeah that one more thing lately for me has been the Apple journal app it's a new tool that is designed to help you reflect and practice gratitude through writing about moments in your day I have been using it for the past month and aspects of this app are not what I expected maybe Apple wanted to break our expectations to repair our minds or maybe it's not that deep and it's just different I'm Bridget Cary and this is one more thing Apple announced Journal way back in June at WWDC as an iOS 17 feature but this app needed some more time to bake it was not included in the first iOS 17 release I have been testing it out for a month with the public beta version of iOS 17.2 it should be very close to the experience that many folks will have at the official launch and that could be any day now the journal app is not just a place to jot down thoughts on blank pages I have plenty of blank journals that I never write in already but for some reason I keep buying them because they're pretty when I am burnt out after a long day I'm not grabbing this instead I'm doing what any sane person does I'm scrolling through my phone in bed yeah suddenly it makes sense to journal at night in the phone when I don't already have a habit of writing in a notebook I open the journal app and right away when I click to make a post I get personalized suggestions on what to write about now for this video I'm going to hide or blur some of what's on my screen because it gets real detailed it pulls from my recent activity like the photos I took the people I texted with a map of places I went to music I've listened to and if I ever logged a workout on my Apple watch it would show me that too it also weaves in photo memories from several years back and it throws in prompts of ideas and questions to reflect about so the prompts they're not cheesy I find them to be interesting when you want to zoom out a bit with a thought exercise now scrolling through my suggestions I see a Friday night hangout with friends I see my son when he was real little from three years ago I see a question prompt I see my family picking out a Christmas tree from this weekend I see photos of my dad visiting New York from 2018 and I see a reminder that I ate at Wendy's last week of course not everything is worthy of making a post about it but you are getting this little flashback jolt as your brain replays memories without you trying some of the suggestions can be a little strange when you realize that your iPhone is digging up these old baby photos to hit you in the fields and then it also knows when you went to Wendy's at this exact location would you like to write about Wendy's okay clearly you start to see that your phone knows a lot about your life and your burger consumption habits Apple says this is all being done while protecting your privacy the raw suggested post from your activities stays inside the iPhone and Apple cannot see it same goes for any third party journal app that decides to use Apple's journaling suggestion tool API Apple's website says that no one but you can access your journal and even if your phone is unlocked and let's say you hand your phone to someone for a bit they cannot get into the app because you could lock access to the app itself I set it to unlock with a face ID check and if you sync it to iCloud it's going to be stored with endtoend encryption so far the app is almost always hitting me with kid photo memory memories trying to give me a dopamine hit with all the Nostalgia like hey remember this cute moment I guess my problems today aren't so big if I think about the nice stuff of the past it's like a therapist guiding you to reset your perspectives now there are some mistakes I've noticed once I got my nails done early in the morning and the app assumed that I was having breakfast at a restaurant next door I suppose it's okay if it's not perfect it's just meant to be a starting point for your little dear diary moment you don't have to write a post for every suggestion there are also limits to what media you can use you can make an entry using photos audio or video but video files need to be under 500 megabytes so a 2-minute video that is shot in 4k was not something I could add limiting the size of your files could actually help save your storage you see your entries are stored locally on your iPhone so every time you add a photo or a video that's more storage being used up so far everything here is what I expected you got this fancy little digital diary but what I'm about to say sounds strange but here's what I did not expect I didn't expect that there's no way to share any of these posts and it's not just no sharing it's no searching so yeah I can't go oh I remember that nice Halloween post let me pull up that photo and share it no no nothing to sharable so you are crafting what look like classic Facebook posts but it's just for you no one will know about this post yeah too many years with the iPhone and social media has clearly messed me up I can't fathom making content that no one else will see I realize that I have to rethink a few things about the value of writing about my memories and the no searching part is kind of a bummer you may think oh when did we do that trip I know I'll just go into my journal and look it up but searching is just scrolling backward the best you can do is bookmark some of your favorite posts because you can narrow down entries by filtering it by what is bookmarked or filter it by just showing you photos or audio posts or locations so I guess scrolling is kind of like flipping through the pages of a written Journal but then what's the point of journaling digitally okay it's easier the iPhone is serving it all up to me but also maybe it's so that you're even more locked into depending on your iPhone imagine a year goes by you made over 100 maybe 200 posts all stored on the iPhone would you just throw that away just toss out your diary and switch to Android apple found yet another way to make you not want to leave iOS for Android I'm not the only ceter that has been testing out journal in beta our managing editor and iPhone reviewer Patrick Holland has been playing with it so what are his first impressions well like you I've enjoyed the journal app so far but sadly I haven't had any prompts to relive that great Frosty and Fries experience I had at Wendy's what surprises me about Journal is well how onapple it is the star of the app or the suggestions and how easily they trigger a memory or make me relive a moment set at the time seemed otherwise mundane and now resonates with all the feels what Journal does best is give me a space for my feelings and a way to organize my thoughts the suggestions are very personal and private there was one that made me want to call my family and another where I wished I still could and I'm glad apple is opening up the suggestions and prompts aspect of the app to others to adopt I could see a wellness app like lra incorporate them in its journaling feature which I hope they do oh and uh one more thing the experience of using Journal reminds me of the analog experiences I had doing creative writing exercises or following the book The Artist way and I definitely recommend checking it out what do you think Bridget I would say it is worth trying the journal app sure there are things I think could be tweaked like adding a way to search for a post or linking me back to the photo inside my photo library so I can share the actual photo of a cute moment that was served up to me but if the job of Journal was to help my mental health to fix some of the busy brain problems we have in this day and age yeah it gave me some perspective help with exercises that I did not do before it made me think about what really matters a little more I don't do it every night but with how fast time flies by I think just opening the app and looking back helps put time into perspective let me know what you think of a journal app and if you be interested in trying this out or maybe there's something else an iOS 17.2 that you're more interested in you can let me know in the comments or just don't let me know write it in your journal and never send it to anyone I'll catch you next Friday for one more thinghave you noticed that the iPhone has been trying to fix us this little screen in our pocket is keeping track of so many things in our life it's smart enough to give us suggestions and now a major selling point of the iPhone is how those suggestions can make you a better you go to sleep sooner change your display color at night so you can calm down would you like to take a moment to reflect on how you feel right now wait hold the phone back your eyes are too close to the screen and you know what your music is too loud but good job your screen time is is down this week would you like to do one more thing on this screen before you go to bed yeah that one more thing lately for me has been the Apple journal app it's a new tool that is designed to help you reflect and practice gratitude through writing about moments in your day I have been using it for the past month and aspects of this app are not what I expected maybe Apple wanted to break our expectations to repair our minds or maybe it's not that deep and it's just different I'm Bridget Cary and this is one more thing Apple announced Journal way back in June at WWDC as an iOS 17 feature but this app needed some more time to bake it was not included in the first iOS 17 release I have been testing it out for a month with the public beta version of iOS 17.2 it should be very close to the experience that many folks will have at the official launch and that could be any day now the journal app is not just a place to jot down thoughts on blank pages I have plenty of blank journals that I never write in already but for some reason I keep buying them because they're pretty when I am burnt out after a long day I'm not grabbing this instead I'm doing what any sane person does I'm scrolling through my phone in bed yeah suddenly it makes sense to journal at night in the phone when I don't already have a habit of writing in a notebook I open the journal app and right away when I click to make a post I get personalized suggestions on what to write about now for this video I'm going to hide or blur some of what's on my screen because it gets real detailed it pulls from my recent activity like the photos I took the people I texted with a map of places I went to music I've listened to and if I ever logged a workout on my Apple watch it would show me that too it also weaves in photo memories from several years back and it throws in prompts of ideas and questions to reflect about so the prompts they're not cheesy I find them to be interesting when you want to zoom out a bit with a thought exercise now scrolling through my suggestions I see a Friday night hangout with friends I see my son when he was real little from three years ago I see a question prompt I see my family picking out a Christmas tree from this weekend I see photos of my dad visiting New York from 2018 and I see a reminder that I ate at Wendy's last week of course not everything is worthy of making a post about it but you are getting this little flashback jolt as your brain replays memories without you trying some of the suggestions can be a little strange when you realize that your iPhone is digging up these old baby photos to hit you in the fields and then it also knows when you went to Wendy's at this exact location would you like to write about Wendy's okay clearly you start to see that your phone knows a lot about your life and your burger consumption habits Apple says this is all being done while protecting your privacy the raw suggested post from your activities stays inside the iPhone and Apple cannot see it same goes for any third party journal app that decides to use Apple's journaling suggestion tool API Apple's website says that no one but you can access your journal and even if your phone is unlocked and let's say you hand your phone to someone for a bit they cannot get into the app because you could lock access to the app itself I set it to unlock with a face ID check and if you sync it to iCloud it's going to be stored with endtoend encryption so far the app is almost always hitting me with kid photo memory memories trying to give me a dopamine hit with all the Nostalgia like hey remember this cute moment I guess my problems today aren't so big if I think about the nice stuff of the past it's like a therapist guiding you to reset your perspectives now there are some mistakes I've noticed once I got my nails done early in the morning and the app assumed that I was having breakfast at a restaurant next door I suppose it's okay if it's not perfect it's just meant to be a starting point for your little dear diary moment you don't have to write a post for every suggestion there are also limits to what media you can use you can make an entry using photos audio or video but video files need to be under 500 megabytes so a 2-minute video that is shot in 4k was not something I could add limiting the size of your files could actually help save your storage you see your entries are stored locally on your iPhone so every time you add a photo or a video that's more storage being used up so far everything here is what I expected you got this fancy little digital diary but what I'm about to say sounds strange but here's what I did not expect I didn't expect that there's no way to share any of these posts and it's not just no sharing it's no searching so yeah I can't go oh I remember that nice Halloween post let me pull up that photo and share it no no nothing to sharable so you are crafting what look like classic Facebook posts but it's just for you no one will know about this post yeah too many years with the iPhone and social media has clearly messed me up I can't fathom making content that no one else will see I realize that I have to rethink a few things about the value of writing about my memories and the no searching part is kind of a bummer you may think oh when did we do that trip I know I'll just go into my journal and look it up but searching is just scrolling backward the best you can do is bookmark some of your favorite posts because you can narrow down entries by filtering it by what is bookmarked or filter it by just showing you photos or audio posts or locations so I guess scrolling is kind of like flipping through the pages of a written Journal but then what's the point of journaling digitally okay it's easier the iPhone is serving it all up to me but also maybe it's so that you're even more locked into depending on your iPhone imagine a year goes by you made over 100 maybe 200 posts all stored on the iPhone would you just throw that away just toss out your diary and switch to Android apple found yet another way to make you not want to leave iOS for Android I'm not the only ceter that has been testing out journal in beta our managing editor and iPhone reviewer Patrick Holland has been playing with it so what are his first impressions well like you I've enjoyed the journal app so far but sadly I haven't had any prompts to relive that great Frosty and Fries experience I had at Wendy's what surprises me about Journal is well how onapple it is the star of the app or the suggestions and how easily they trigger a memory or make me relive a moment set at the time seemed otherwise mundane and now resonates with all the feels what Journal does best is give me a space for my feelings and a way to organize my thoughts the suggestions are very personal and private there was one that made me want to call my family and another where I wished I still could and I'm glad apple is opening up the suggestions and prompts aspect of the app to others to adopt I could see a wellness app like lra incorporate them in its journaling feature which I hope they do oh and uh one more thing the experience of using Journal reminds me of the analog experiences I had doing creative writing exercises or following the book The Artist way and I definitely recommend checking it out what do you think Bridget I would say it is worth trying the journal app sure there are things I think could be tweaked like adding a way to search for a post or linking me back to the photo inside my photo library so I can share the actual photo of a cute moment that was served up to me but if the job of Journal was to help my mental health to fix some of the busy brain problems we have in this day and age yeah it gave me some perspective help with exercises that I did not do before it made me think about what really matters a little more I don't do it every night but with how fast time flies by I think just opening the app and looking back helps put time into perspective let me know what you think of a journal app and if you be interested in trying this out or maybe there's something else an iOS 17.2 that you're more interested in you can let me know in the comments or just don't let me know write it in your journal and never send it to anyone I'll catch you next Friday for one more thing\n"