I've been wanting to start a thread on journaling for a while, and there were several replies to my comments on the "favorite app" thread, so here it is
The most popular app for journaling is probably Day One, but it didn't work for me. I don't like the way it displays entries and images. I think Day One may be better suited to people who mostly use their iPhone for journaling, but my main device is my iPad. Of course this is just my personal experience based on my personal requirements. Feel free to disagree!
I started keeping a journal thanks to my iPad and Noteshelf. I have always loved the sensation of writing with a pencil on paper, and now that I take all my professional notes on iPad or laptop, I miss it. And when I discovered Noteshelf, I liked it so much that I started keeping a journal with it.
But there are some limitations to using Noteshelf. One is that I need my iPad with me to write on it. This was not a huge problem as I took it with me almost everywhere, but since I bought an iPhone 6+ I sometimes leave the house without the iPad, when I want to lighten my handbag. Also, Noteshelf is good for handwriting but not much else. The notebook simile is reassuring but very limiting. I can't browse journal entries by date. I can insert photos but somehow I'm never satisfied with the way they look in the notebook. And I still miss pencil and paper. Noteshelf is the closest to that sensation on the iPad but it's not the real thing.
It took me months to finally come up with a combination that mostly gives me what I want, although of course it's not perfect, and it requires a little work. Here's what I use:
- Noteshelf of course, I still use and enjoy it.
- As many paper notebooks as I want! Currently I'm using a large one for home, a small one for traveling light, plus a Moleskine just because.
- Awesome Notes.
- FasterScan on my iPhone, because it's much more practical to use for scanning than the iPad.
- Evernote.
Awesome Notes is the central app that I use to store all my handwritten notes, typed notes, photos, checklists, and occasionally reminders (though it's not the best app for that and I just bought 2do, so I may stop using Awesome Notes for reminders). Evernote serves as a gateway for sending notes to Awesome Notes, and also as a backup and a way to sync between iPad and iPhone, and even read my journal on PC or Mac even though Awesome Notes is iOS only. Actually Evernote is probably the most important element in this setup, but I prefer the look and feel of Awesome Notes, so I use it as a kind of Evernote client.
Noteshelf has an option to sync to Evernote, but I don't use it for my journal. It creates one note per notebook in the Noteshelf Evernote book, and each page is an image in that book. This doesn't work for me since I want to be able to mix Noteshelf pages with entries from other sources. So at the end of each day, I export the pages I wrote in Noteshelf. This creates a note with one image for each page, and I upload it directly to the Awesome Notes journal notebook. I use the low definition option for images, otherwise the upload would take forever (that's one drawback of Noteshelf, it generates huge files).
For paper journals, I use the same technique except that I have to scan them first, using FasterScan. I then upload them to Evernote as one note per day with an image for each page, directly to the same Awesome Notes journal.
I also have a Drafts shortcut to post text notes to Awesome Note through Evernote, but I almost never use it. I suppose IFTTT could be used similarly, but I have never tried that service.