Beautiful planning and tracking app
Price: Free to download
Subscription: $5/£5 monthly or $40/£40 yearly
Version: 0.200206.30
Size: 125 MB
Developer: Moleskine
Moleskine, the same Moleskine that made its name in beautifully designed stationery notebooks is expanding its phenomenal work in app design.
We’ve previously used and loved the Moleskine calendar. But while its design – simple, yet bold, smooth, yet dynamic – made us want to use it as our calendar of choice, other apps’ features were just a tad better.
From the opening setup instructions to the app itself, the design feels both designed for iOS while retaining Moleskine’s own style of minimalist design
This may have just been solved thanks to Moleskine Journey. The calendar is present on this app, which expands its functionality into a fully-fledged journal and planner. As well as simply viewing your appointments in a lovely scrollable ticker, the app places its focus towards mindful organization.
The ‘home’ tab of the app is titled ‘My Day’. It gives you an overview of actions to take or things to be aware of. Tap the window at the top and you can add or take a picture. This is a great way to start a photo diary and at a later date go back through and remember what you’ve been up to and what you’ve seen.
The calendar ticker reflects Moleskine’s Timepage app
Under that, you have a ‘journal’. As the app states, the likes of Einstein kept a daily journal and the way this app allows you to quickly jot down or add thoughts throughout the day gives it a minimalist feel that could help even the more monosyllabic of us to get a few thoughts out of our heads and on to a page.
Then there’s ‘Today’s Goals’. We found this struggled to fully replace a conventional to-do list, but worked well in a more minimalistic fashion by including a few daily aspirations. We also found this gave us a bit of room to be more stern in our desire to achieve them. We generally put items here we’d been putting off for a good while.
The main tab lets you keep a photo diary and deal with that day’s items
This follows the planner, which pulls in the daily appointments from your calendar, and a food diary. Again, Moleskine’s approach takes the pressure off tracking. Unlike when we’ve used food diaries attached to calorie-counting or health-conscious apps, we found Moleskine gave us room to just put things down. It didn’t matter if we forgot to take a photo of our food. The words were enough, the app’s choice of font and monochrome design adding extra power to the simplicity.
Adding tasks to a project lets you work through what you have to do methodically
Other than that, the app also contains a ‘Projects’ tab and ‘Tasks’. We found that the projects tab is useful for splitting to-dos into various separate areas, compartmentalizing the way you complete tasks. For example, you could also simply turn the projects into days of the week to schedule how you want to complete tasks, though you can also apply timings and alerts to your tasks. However, the Tasks tab seems a little extraneous, simply pulling in a long list of to-dos from the projects tab. We’d say this is the only place the app bloats – but it’s easily ignored if you don’t need it.
Keeping a food diary is quick and easy
Overall, Moleskine Journey is a beautiful app for those that may not have tracked much of their daily lives before, while also providing one place to also pull in future activities. This might also be useful for those moving away from social media – we found the food and photo diaries scratched a particular itch for recording things we might otherwise have posted to Facebook or Instagram in the past.
The bad? Though there’s a two-week free trial, the price tag could be enough to put some users off. We’d recommend giving this kind or journaling a try to see if it’s worth the $40/£40 yearly fee before committing.