Presently- App Review
When I reflect back on 2019, a major part of the year was filled with great associations and a bunch of book recommendations that came my way which largely influenced me to become a better person in both personal and professional front.
How grateful are you today?
I have been very fortunate to have stumbled on this mobile app called “Presently”. It is a free forever gratitude journal entry app. It has a very simple and sleek UI. If there is one new thing that you would like to do this new year, you can as well kick start with Presently.
Presently is an open-source project and it claims it will be a free and helpful tool for everyone for all the time to come. So they wouldn’t charge or have any ads and have taken a great stand on privacy boundaries. It is rated 4.8 and has 100K+ downloads.
The app is just a click away from Playstore App( Sadly only available on Andriod devices for now!). As soon as it is downloaded it directly takes the user to the main screen which has a timeline where a user can start their journal entry. This is the best part I like as there is zero effort involved in signing up or creating an account. Every entry is chronologically arranged and is just a scroll away. I absolutely love how simple and user-friendly and smooth the app is.
If you are someone who has trouble starting up, the app also gives you ideas to pen your thoughts on.
The entries made on each day can be shared with anyone via third party apps Such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter to name a few.
You can also set daily reminder notification to get push notifications about the same. But if you have “power saving” settings enabled on your device these notifications won’t work. As the notifications are limited in order to save charge. The creators have decided to not give over right permissions access respecting privacy.
There are a few themes the users can choose from. ( They also have the dark mode themes, which I love!) The entries can be searched either date wise or content-wise and the search results are pretty neat and quick.
All the entries can be backed any time and these are stored in a CSV file format in the local device. This entire concept is debatable, as nothing is available on the cloud. So If I lose my handheld device tomorrow and reinstall the app, it will be a fresh start, all the previous entries will cease to exist. On the other hand, this ensures a greater power to a user in terms of privacy and they can always be assured that their information is well protected which gives a sense of control to the end-user.
If I am given a choice to chose between the two, I’d always want the ability to access my journals from anywhere and from any device so a Google Drive backup will be a very powerful addition to the App.
I am someone who strongly believes in the fact that “one picture is worth a thousand words.” Another powerful feature addition will be the ability to attach images inline as a part of the journal entry. In a physical journal attaching images is not be possible and hence this feature could be great value addition.
I wrote this blog with a simple intention to make app discoverable so everyone can start to exercise a simple habit forming attitude of expressing gratitude, which I am sure will help in the longer run.
So, what are you planning to do differently this new year? Do let me know what you think about this app review and the new habit that you are planning to kick start in this brand new decade, in the comments below! :)
