Shared Journals for Day One

From Day One:

Shared Journals are a private space for your closest friends and family to shared life updates and memories. Shared Journals introduce a new dimension to journaling, offering a unique way to share your personal stories and experiences with up to 30 selected individuals, while keeping your individual entries private and secure.

I’ve tried to track most of the milestones in the lives of my kids in Day One, and knowing I can now share that with my partner is pretty awesome. I’ve been using tags to group these posts but now I can break them into their own journal that I can share and collaborate on. Day One is one of the best apps out there due to their constant iteration on an already outstanding product. I’m really glad to see they continue to thrive as part of Automattic, as I was a bit concerned when that acquisition went down a few years back.

Albums 4.4 Released

Albums 4.4 was released this week, and it’s another feature-packed one. The 2 biggest additions for me is the ability to rate songs from within the app and the last.fm history import. The last.fm import in particular is awesome, as it gives the app the ability to build up a list of albums you have played but aren’t in your library as well as build up a historical “top albums played” in years prior to you using the app. As you may know, the way Apple Music tracks plays is simply incrementing play counts by 1, so frequency of listens is hard to do without a custom database. Fortunately, Albums does just that, and now it can backfill previous album listens along with the way it already tracks listening frequency.

Over the past few years Albums has become one of my most-used apps and I’ve really enjoyed seeing all of the love and attention Adam Linder has put into the app. I wrote about this a little while ago, but for me the ability to work through albums and see stats on what I’ve listened to and when has really made Apple Music that much better of a service to me. I rediscover music I haven’t heard in a long time as well as get insight into my listening habits in a way I haven’t been able to in other apps/services.

Albums is free for most of the functionality, and a $0.99/mo subscription for all of the bells and whistles.