Day One has been one of the most popular journaling apps in the App Store for years, and it has always stuck to its guns: privately storing your thoughts and memories. But what about when you want to share something with your friends?
Today Day One is introducing Publish, a way to do exactly that.
Publish allows you to selectively share Day One entries with the world. When you use Publish, it automatically formats the entry into a simple, clean webpage that can be shared with a www.dayone.me/ URL. There are built-in options to share directly with Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare.
To share an entry in Day One previously, you had to create a PDF to send over email. Publish is a much more streamlined, web-friendly way of sharing entires with a select group of friends or your entire follower base on Twitter. Live stats are tallied under each shared entry in Day One, including overall views, Facebook comments and likes, and favs/RTs on Twitter. Published entries are highlighted blue in Day One’s main timeline menu.
Day One is already a great text editor with support for Markdown and other styling options. The look of entries in the app itself translates very nicely to the web. Images are displayed edge-to-edge in high-res, and formatted entries with different HTML tags look great. A short author bio with profile picture is included in each shared entry. The look and feel is very reminiscent of Medium.
“Publish lets Day One double as a journal and personal blog”
During beta testing, I was impressed the most by how well Publish just works. In an age where there are so many different ways to share content online, the developers behind Day One have managed to create a lightweight, worry-free publishing platform for users that turns the app into more than just a tool for journaling. You don’t have to worry about hosting, and PublishThe emphasis is still on respecting privacy (the URLs to published entries are only available to the author until shared with others), but Publish lets Day One double as a journal and personal blog.
That’s not to say that Publish isn’t without its faults. The feature is rather barebones at launch, and you can only Publish entries on the iPhone initially. There’s no way to imbed more than one image or a video. I’d like to see Day One add more customization options for sharing on other social networks. Currently you can’t create a custom message to accompany a published URL entry on Twitter, and complete entries are just pasted into Facebook statuses. It would be nice to have the option of sharing only a URL on Facebook with a short message.
I used Publish to keep my friends and family updated during my trip to the Sochi Winter Olympics, and overall, I was thoroughly impressed. Day One for iOS is available for $5 in the App Store and $10 in the Mac App Store.
Source: App Store
