Daily App: Heyday is a journaling app that writes your daily entries for you
Heyday is a journaling app for people who are too busy to pen daily entries into their journal. The app creates entries on your behalf based upon the places you go and the photos you take. Heyday works surprisingly well at creating a timeline of your daily comings and goings.
Heyday's strong point is its photo collages. The app grabs the photos from your photo roll and organizes them into groups based on time and location. It creates collages using these groups and adds them to your timeline as journal entries. The app does a wonderful job capturing each moment as it was recorded in photos. These collages can be shared via Facebook, Twitter, Mail or Messages. You can also save them to your photo roll.
Heyday is more than just a photo journal, though. The app also uses your location information and will create journal entries when you stop at a point of interest. Take a lunch break at your local coffee shop, and Heyday will add that event to your timeline.
The app has some basic editing tools that allow you to change the layout and add context to your photos and check-ins. Tapping the pencil icon next to each journal entry opens the editing screen where you can type in a quick note like "Met John for lunch," or "Great day skiing." You can also manually add photos or tag the location if the app only pulled up the address and not the exact point of interest. If you used your Facebook login with the app, you can add in a list of people who joined you at that event. Photo collages in each entry can also be changed. You can swap out the pictures, add filters and change the layout to suit your needs.
The automatic journaling aspect of Heyday makes all the difference. Just install the app and let your journal write itself. Check back after seven days, and you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much you managed to cram into a week's worth of activities. If you want to look back and find a specific moment, Heyday even has a handy search tool that allows you to search by time, place and people.
Heyday stores journal entries only in the app and merely links to your photos, which is perfect for privacy, but not so good for long-term storage. The journal exists only on your phone, and there is no easy way to export your entries to a blog or other online medium. It's even worse when you back up your photos and remove them from your iPhone. Removing photos will destroy your photo journal entries -- all that is left are entries with blank placeholders where the images used to be. It can be heartbreaking to lose all those entries, especially if you spent time typing in notes and tagging locations.
Though I appreciate the automatic journal entries, I likely won't continue to use the app because of the image issue. My photos are important to me, and I regularly remove them from my phone to back them up. (Update: the developer is working on a secure method to per store photos within the app and will roll out this feature in a future update.)
Heyday is available for free from the iOS App Store. There are no in-app purchases and no ads, but Heyday does require you to create a login using your email or Facebook account.
