OK I've spent more time with it. The mobile app is not great. Syncing just freezes - though it appears to sync everything, it never ends, so you have to kill it. But I think the mobile app is still the old bad one, hasn't been updated in a year.
Desktop app is great. Love the focus mode where it is green text on a full screen. Wish there was a typewriter mode where it kept your text in the middle of the screen (yeah, I write a lot).
Comparing this directly to Day One:
Negatives: There is no "Entries on this day in past years" - putting several photos on an entry makes the scrolling jaggedy. The location screen has to slowly count through all your entries every time you go to it and it takes a long time to count through. The mobile app gets data but seems to be broken a bit. I can't find a way to sort ascending vs descending (an issue when you have many thousands of entries).
Positives: Very well designed application that feels solid. You can encrypt your entries and lock them. The app handles photos very well and text entry is pleasant. Love the focused writing mode - green text on a black screen that fills the entire screen.
It imports from Day One perfectly (as long as you export one journal at a time). Photos, locations, tags, text and all. A+.
I haven't figured out how to change the white background of the default editor yet, but I'll figure it out.
I really like it. I have never been super comfortable with Day One's cloud sync, but I'm sure it made sense to them to sync without problems to mobile devices - and they do it very well. At $35/year, it's not a bank breaker. That said, I like an app that I don't have to pay for that doesn't rely on other people's cloud syncs and what not.
Seriously going to consider using this as my primary journalism tool just because I'm becoming an old fart and don't like the idea of (even my encrypted) daily logs going out on some cloud server. I'm also really against a subscription $ if I can help it.
I export my monthly daily logs to a PDF - so I'll be testing this over the next month. If I end up really liking this, paying for Day One (which has been very stable and good) will be something I have to think about. $24.99/year isn't much, but I really don't want to use two apps.
