The beginning of a new year is always a good time to start new things, especially a journal. Even if you may have fallen a bit behind, it’s never too late to start. I’m just terrible at keeping journals, though, and have lots of lovely books with only the first ten or so pages filled in. I need an app to help me out!
My Wonderful Days is that app, recording everything that happens to me everyday. With reminders and lots of ways to customize my entries, including images, I may just be able to stick to my journal this year.
Record Your Thoughts
Even if you haven’t had a wonderful day, but especially if you have, click the red Today pencil to start a new entry. You’ll get a new blank journal entry, with a prompt up top. The default is “Today is…” and it’s just there to get you going if you’re not sure how to put your thoughts on paper.
There’s a sort of happy meter just below the entry window. If, for instance, you’d been to traffic court that day, you’ll obviously swing that slider all the way to gloomy, but if you got to meet a corgi puppy named Jimmy, you’ll scoot the slider over to positively ecstatic.
Write about your day in My Wonderful Days.
Click the camera icon to add images. While your image won’t be visible while you’re editing, My Wonderful Days will show you a thumbnail in the timeline view, and you can browse your journal images, too. You can remind yourself what kind of day it was quickly by clicking the heart and choosing up to two icons to represent your day. The icons are pretty limited, but there are both weather and emotions icons for you to choose from.
If you realize you left something out of an entry after you’ve saved, click the pencil icon to edit your entry. I find it’s easy to forget to set the happiness slider and I usually wait to add pictures until later, so I make good use of the journal edit feature. It really takes the pressure off of having to sit down and write about my entire day all in one go.
The search feature, available by clicking the magnifying glass at the bottom of the timeline drawer, will not only search your journal entries, but it will sort them, too. The timeline obviously keeps everything in chronological order, but the search is where you will find your starred entries. It also sorts your entries by best (or worst) day if you need a pick-me-up.
Sort your entries using the search feature.
My Wonderful Preferences
There are some pretty useful settings if you click the gear icon, including iCloud sync. If you have the iOS version of My Wonderful Days, you can sync up your journal entries. I like being able to create and edit my journal entries when I’m away from my computer and still have them show up there when I get home.
My Wonderful Days will set a passcode lock for you if you’re worried about anyone taking a peek at your journal. You can set how long you’ll have to be inactive before the app requires the code. If you forget the code, though, you may end up having to erase all of your entries, so be careful with this feature.
Update your preferences, like passcode and entry prompt.
If you’re me and you tend to forget things like journaling, you can set My Wonderful Days to remind you everyday at a specific time. You can also change the prompt you get when you start a new entry, but unfortunately it will always be the starting point you set and won’t cycle through different prompts.
Entry Annoyances
While you can add multiple images to an entry, they aren’t actually visible in the entry itself. You have to open a separate image viewer to see them. I really like having my images attached to the entry and adding more than one image, but I wish they were incorporated into the actual journal entry itself.
My Wonderful Days only lets you have one entry per day, too. If two big things happen in the same day, they have to go in the same entry. I wish I could do an entry for my morning adventure of cooking and finding a lost kitten and then add a second, separate entry for my evening out with friends. As it is now, everything I do in a single day has to be lumped together.
The My Wonderful Days timeline shows your most recent entries.
Final Thoughts
This is a nice little journaling app, there’s no question about it. It’s charming, and the interface reinforces a feeling of writing in an actual journal. However, it’s missing some features I want to see, like the ability to have multiple entries in a single day, timestamps on entries, pictures inside the entries themselves, or even the ability to grab location data.
That said, it’s a lot less expensive than an app like Day One that gives you all of that. If you’re not sure you’re ready to commit to daily journaling and don’t want to shell out the bones for a more pricey, albeit feature-rich, app, My Wonderful Days is a nice entry-level model. You’ll get everything you need to keep a daily journal in an experience nice enough that you’ll want to come back everyday, which is all you really need from a journal.