A deep dive into a shallow pool
2025-Apr-04
Table of Contents
Initial Excitement
In December of 2023, Apple announced their new journal app as part of iOS 17.2 to some amount of fanfare. It received some decent reviews.
Being that I'm pretty quick to apply new updates for security purposes, I decided to give it a try. I used it for all of 2 days before kind of giving up. I don't recall being upset with it - just mostly I was not in the habit of journaling regularly, so it just was a case of trying it out. I didn't think poorly of it, but it also failed to really grab me.
It pretty much sat unused for all that time. In the meantime, in the past year or so I've been using a an app called Obsidian for various other tasks, and I managed to get myself more into the habit of journaling on a consistent basis.
Fast forward to this past weekend when I finally had enough of Microsoft Windows. There are a myriad of reasons, but I'm particularly salty about the planned pulling of the plug on Windows 10, which will cause massive churn / eWaste, and also how they're deliberately blocking folks from setting up Windows 11 using a local only account. There's a lot there but you can see an article on how to work around the latest escalation at Tom's Hardware. That and the direction they're taking with "recall" (It doesn't apply to any of the machines I own but it's just the increasing push toward really intrusive unwanted "features"). I'm sure I could drone on for ages about it - so lets just take it as read that my foray into MacOS has been brewing a while.
The Concept
So, the concept that excited me was that while I do sit at a computer quite a bit of the day, and I can type fairly fast, such that typing is my preferred way to get content into digital format; still, when I'm otherwise engaged, or away from my desk, the idea of being able to fire up the Journal app and have it "reduce friction" for me to get some content in via Dictation.
The way the Journal app just handles making the new dated entry when you want to take a note, and the promise of integration with some other possibly useful/interesting things, like I saw mention that it would link to the health app or see who you were communicating with to prompt you to post something about them or your interaction. That sounded possibly interesting.
The idea of being frictionless and letting you just quickly make notes without self editing or censoring and then letting you collect it later is what appealed to me. I imagined myself using the journal app throughout the day and then sitting at the computer with the notes to kind of arrange /order them into something a bit more suited for preservation.
The Reality
I guess first the good - the part where you can quickly start dictating a note and it handles the file creation/date-stamp was fine. I did find it was pretty easy to just start noting, then go back and make some more notes later.
However, that promised integration with the Health app? I was picturing that it could grab my sleep numbers (the watch helps track your sleep quality and time), my health numbers (pulse, blood ox, respiration) etc... and somehow prompt to include. Nope, the promised integration seems to be just that it can tell the health "mindfullness" app that you're journaling.
Bloody useless.
I'm sorry, maybe mindfulness is your thing, but I turned off those "take a minute and breathe" features first thing when I got my Apple Watch. The things I care about: steps / heart-rate etc.. nada.
The Show-Stopper
Ok so all that said, I had a few entries for the day and I sat down with my MacBook to go head and do the editing...
Hmm, no Journal app.
Ok so I guess I need to install it. So I search the App store; it's not there.
Odd that they'd make that a separate not-app-store download, but OK. I search Apple and wut?
You are JOKING me...
Its only for iPhone - not even iPad apparently
So, I can put the journal entries in, but there's no easy way to actually do something with them. They're in yet another "walled garden".
I have no words.
The Alternative
So, what's the alternative?
Fortunately, as I mentioned above I had already been using an application called Obsidian to do my journaling. I had been trying to stick within the direct Apple ecosystem here - I thought because of the supposed integration with other apps available to Journal that might not be available to other apps, it would be the best choice.
With the Journal app being strictly iPhone, well, I knew Obsidian offered an iOS version, but I also knew that it wasn't likely to play nice with my github repository that I was using. However, Obsidian offered a paid tier with sync using their app directly. I installed it on the phone and sure enough, sync was an available feature as a core plugin. I plonked down my $96 for a year (I could have done the $48 tier but I decided to go with the plan that gave me up to 10 vaults so I could use it with my personal KB and my whip-making notes etc).
When the Alternative is Better...
And wow, truly I've had few products "just work" quite so well as Obsidian did in this case.
I just took an existing vault on my windows server and connected it with the Obsidian vault. This required that I come up with a nice secure password for the aes256 encryption unlock and hit Connect - it was done in a flash.
Now, on the Mac, I could just delete the copy I had been synching via git repo, Then tell Obsidian to connect to the remote sync, give it my password and hist start syncing.
Same thing on the iPhone - just open the app, connect to the remote vault, provide the password and let it sync.
Updates happen pretty quickly. Generally any time I switch away from files, but even during typing - when there is a pause, it syncs. I can see it do this on my local computer even as I type this article.
The right Core Plugins
I already had the Daily Note and templates plugins enabled, but I hadn't been using them. I went ahead and set up a template for my base blog entry. It would have a standard format
# {{date:YYYY MMMM DD (dddd)}}
## WORK
## SLEEP
## FOOD
## MISC
## TIDT
## TILT
## BLOGFODDER
## [[_TODO_Master|TODO]]
- [ ] fnordThat date string gives me a nicely formatted date with the full month and day names
(I've found it useful when looking at old journal entries to see the day of week right in the heading without having to go look it up on the calendar, as I often will refer to recent or upcoming dates as "last Tuesday", "this coming Friday" etc)
I find the main categories here worked for me (TIDT: Things I did today, TILT: Things I learned today) etc.. they serve as prompts to think about things in terms of what I did, what I learned, and other such things. I'll adjust the categories by day - sometimes I don't use one, other times I come up with a new heading.
I try not to let structure or formatting get in the way. To me, this is the important essence of what a Journal should be (and why I love Markdown)
So, it never synched up to my Heath app, but honestly, the fact that I can dictate into Obsidian on the phone, pick up right where I was on my desktop go grab some links or images and paste them in there etc... and have it all "just work" is the frictionless experience I had hoped for.
As a bonus of course, if there had been a Journal app for MacOS, I am betting it would have kept the data in some proprietary internal format and not been portable or very exportable.
With Markdown files, the data is very human-readable yet also pretty parsable by software... it really is kind of a best of both worlds.
One thing I do is I use markdown for my personal blog here, and so quickly grabbing content from one of my #BLOGFODDER entries and pasting it into the Obsidian vault where I manage my articles works great. Its really frictionless.
I honestly think it's just as well the Apple Journal app was so disappointing as I ended up realizing that I had the right tool already in hand, I just needed to commit a bit and to actually start truly exploring how to use it.
~DigitalSorceress
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