How to post to iOS and Mac App DayOne from Android

DayOne journalling from Android

My favourite application for journalling, diary keeping is an application called DayOne, the only problem that I have with it is the fact that I use Android with my phone and my Nexus 7 and there is no Android App. The joys of being a slider between platforms iOS and Android. So what I need is to have some way where I can share from my Android devices, so that it all will go into DayOne with no extra work on my part. I did wonder if it would be possible for me to send an email to myself that would let me grab the contents to put into DayOne. I still think that process would be possible, but I have tried another way first and it works. On the Android devices I have used the application called Draft although I could have used any of the text editing applications that synchronise with Dropbox.

The way that it works

The first part of the job is to create the journal entry in Draft and to do that with a particular file name. The file has to be called DayOne.txt and the application is already set to synchronise with Dropbox in app settings. In the blink of an eye the file is saved into the Dropbox folder called Draft. Then it appears like magic onto the Mac and the iPad and the Galaxy S3, anywhere I have Dropbox.

Keyboard Maestro Magic

Keyboard Maestro is a marvellous application that allows you to do all sorts of automation tricks on Mac OS X. I have found on numerous occasions that Keyboard Maestro is far better than the Apple application Automator. I can use it to simulate keypresses and key combinations and to work off numerous triggers. In this case I decided to have two triggers, one is based upon a time and I have chosen 11:30 PM in the evening and the other trigger works from a keyboard combination. This means that I can activate it manually or I can leave it and at the specified time the macro will run by itself and add my Android journal entries into DayOne.

listen to ‘Sliding in Android DayOne posts ’ on Audioboo

I have the macro open up the specified file and to select all text within it and copy it to the clipboard. Then the Keyboard Maestro macro opens up DayOne in a new journal entry mode and pastes the text from the clipboard. I then have it set so that DayOne changes to the list view and this effectively saves the post.

To finish off the macro and to tidy up, I then tell it to delete the text file that was opened up by Textmate on my Mac. This has to be done so that I don't end up with the duplicate entries. During the testing procedure I did use the command to move the original file to another folder rather than to delete. After I have found that the copying and pasting into DayOne had been successful I decided to change it to delete the file as I no longer needed to keep them.

What comes next to automate journalling with DayOne

Any other posts that I make to Google plus, Facebook, Twitter or any other social networks are in effect journalling or diary keeping. It would be handy to be able to take those social network postings and to put them into one place. The application DayOne would be a good place for all of that. There is a guy called Brett Terpstra who has created some scripts that take the posts that he has made on social networks and put them automatically into DayOne. The set of scripts uses the command line interface from DayOne and I have downloaded this and tried to make it work. Unfortunately, I have been unsuccessful in getting it to work on my system. I am just not geeky enough. So I will have to have a look at another way to get this social network journalling to put into DayOne.