The journaling app Day One seems to have garnered universal praise in the nerdosphere since their most recent update. And rightfully so, I believe. The design on both iOS and OS X looks to be outstanding and it has some very convenient features. The functionality added by Brett Terpstra's impressive Slogger¹ project only increases its appeal for a logging junkie like me. But I don't own Day One nor do I plan on buying it. I've been tempted many times, but I always come to the conclusion that it isn't for me.

I don't expect to live exclusively in Apple's ecosystem forever and to think otherwise would be exceedingly shortsighted. Thus, I've been trying my hardest to get away from storing my data in apps. And I've especially avoided storing anything in iCloud². Yes, export is often an option, but if I want my data to be useful to me in 20 years I might as well use a system that's fully accessible and under my control from the start.

So I've made the filesystem my app. Text editors are available on every platform I use. The interface may not be as pretty as what Day One offers, but it gives me all of Day One's core features and with a little bit of work, I can build in my own. For example, using IFTTT³ I can archive all kinds of data from the various services I use to plain text files on Dropbox⁴. The weatherman⁵ command line utility makes it easy to get the day's weather. Everything is just sitting there, waiting for me to actually do something with it. No export required.