Collaborative Journal App

Collaborative Journal App offers a personalized experience for each user. Collaborative Journal App records your journal entries, your self improvement activities, and all of your daily events into one journal as well as an interactive diary that you can share to your friends and family. By using the collaborative journal app, you will be able to understand each phase of your life based on the contents in your journal. The collaborative journal app will prompt you with questions and take you through important life challenges to help uncover your true identity and purpose.

Collaborative Journal is a writing app. It helps you to improve writing by giving you tools to interact with other writers, whether they are your friends, classmates, teachers or strangers who are far apart from each other. As one of the most popular writing apps in the iTunes App Store, Collaborative Journal is well known for simplicity, powerful functions and OS X multitouch interaction.

 Bit.ai for media-rich journaling

Bit.ai: Journal and Diary App

At the number one position, we have Bit.ai. You may ask why?

Bit.ai gives you the power to add more than just text and images to your document. Bit is the smartest application, whether you want to write a journal or a diary.

With Bit, your journal and diary will get a multi-dimensional edge, and you can tell a story beyond simple text. You can add images, videos, links, code snippets, rich media, and even files within your journal/diary to communicate effectively. You can even export it later and create an ebook if you ever felt like publishing it.

The content library of Bit allows you to store and categorize your content. You can also integrate it with cloud platforms and add content from Google Drive, OneDrive, Sharepoint, and Box.

Bit.ai has some incredible features:

  • Auto formatting: Only focus on the content and let Bit do the design and formatting job for you.
  • Document templates: Choose from nearly 100 different templates to get work done.
  • Document themes: Transform your document into a new look with a click of a button. Change the primary theme color to any shade you like and much more.

Journey for a secure journal writing

Journey: Journal and Diary App

It is one of the best journal apps for Android users that lets you write entries and geotag them. In addition, the app lets you track the weather and add a range of media while making entries. This app paves the way for easy journaling that can also be modified conveniently.

There is a premium option that allows you access to many features, such as Markdown access and more aesthetic customization. You can read your journal from any place with the aid of this software.

The app is a complete set of everything! Its noteworthy features include passcode and fingerprint security, a step-by-step tutorial for beginners, and the ability to write email journals.

Google Docs (Web, iOS, Android)

Best for quickly and easily sharing documents with other Google Apps users

Google Docs is the most popular collaborative writing and editing tool today, with nearly 25 million active monthly users (compared to nearly 5 million for Microsoft Word, according to a report from SurveyMonkey). Because it’s so easy to use and automatically tied to every Google account, it’s the default word processing app for many individuals.

Google Docs offers the essential features you’d expect of any popular word processor. It excels, however, in its baked-in collaboration features.

Clear and Easy Commenting: Google Docs lets you comment on any text, image, or other specific part of the page, and highlights the text with comments. These make it easy for both editors and writers to spot parts of the text that need to be addressed: When you scroll through a document, the highlighted text jumps out at you. At the same time, the comments are not inline with the document but off to the side and can be hidden or shown, as well as marked as resolved.

Google Docs comments

Tip: Quickly create a comment with the Control + Alt + M keyboard shortcut in Windows or the Command + Option + M keyboard shortcut on the Mac.

Convenient Suggested Edits Mode: Google Docs’ editing mode feature (the pen icon in the toolbar at the top right) lets you decide whether to directly edit the original document or make all your edits as suggestions. The main benefit of suggestions: they won’t get merged into the original until accepted by the author, so anyone can recommend changes without affecting the original document.

Suggestions come with what looks like a comment, but rather than having a “resolve” button, as comments do, they have accept (checkmark) and reject (X mark) options. This is great for editors who want to suggest a change to the text but want to let the writer decide, and for writers to easily see the kinds of changes their editor(s) typically make for future reference.

The downside, however, is that the suggested edits, color-coded and littered throughout the piece, can be overwhelming. The simple act of deleting a space or adding a comma is called out in green or pink or another color—and that can be daunting for writers who return to find gallons of virtual ink splashed across the page.

Color-coded Google Doc suggested edits

Detailed Revision History: If you need to know what’s been changed in the document, when it was changed, and by whom, Google Docs makes it easy to find that out. Just go to File > See revision history and you can see every edit that was made by collaborators. To revert to a previous version of the document, all you have to do is click the “Restore this version” link.

Google Docs revision history

Exporting to Multiple Formats: Unlike many other writing apps that let you export the document only to text or HTML, Google Docs supports exporting your document to a wide range of file types, including Word (.doc), OpenDocument text (.odt), PDF, HTML, and .epub. This makes Google Docs a great publishing tool and allows collaborators to use your document in just about any app they choose.

Advanced Sharing Controls: Not only can you share a Google Doc via email or with a link, but you can also prevent people you give editing control to from adding others to the doc. You can also disable downloading, printing, and copying for those who only have view or commenting access. And for even more control, set an expiration date on a collaborator’s access to the doc. This is useful when you want to co-author the file with someone but stop sharing it as soon as they’re finished.

Google Docs was created with collaboration in mind from the start–and offered real-time collaboration features before Microsoft Word. You’ll need a Google account to use Google Docs with other collaborators, but those you share the doc with don’t need a Google account to view, comment, or edit the document. (Still, everyone’s got a Google account, right?). With the Google Docs Chrome extension, you can even work on your documents offline. This is one of the easiest apps to collaborate on a document with.

Google Docs Price: Free

Dropbox Paper (Web)

Best for clean, clutter-free writing and rich media support

Dropbox Paper is still in beta. However, the beta feels polished and has an elegant, modern design. Here are some of this writing app’s best features:

Minimalist Design: Dropbox Paper’s design is very reminiscent of online publishing platform Medium. It’s clean and uncluttered, with lots of white space to put the focus on your content, rather than buttons and options. The sleek interface makes Dropbox Paper easy to use and encourages you to just start writing.

Dropbox Paper

Rich Content Embedding: You can insert just about any kind of content into your document: videos from YouTube or Vimeo, audio from Spotify, and files from Dropbox and Google Docs.

Dropbox Paper also offers one of the best ways to use images in your document. You can paste two images next to each other and they’ll be automatically organized side by side. The image toolbar lets you align images left, center, or right, or expand them full width. And if you double-click on an image, it will open in a full-screen gallery view.

Instant Markdown and Code Formatting: Dropbox Paper uses rich text rather than Markdown formatting, but it took my pasted Markdown and re-formatted it as rich text immediately. That was a nice surprise.

Compared to the process of exporting my Markdown as rich text, pasting it into Google Docs, and fixing the parts of my formatting that get lost during that process, Dropbox Paper’s auto-formatting would save me a bunch of time. If you prefer to write in Markdown but the final document needs to be in rich text format, Paper is a lifesaver.

You can also use Dropbox Paper for writing code. Start a line with three backticks ` and the app will automatically detect the programming language and highlight the syntax for you.

Easy Folder or Documents Sharing: Dropbox Paper uses a simple approach to sharing: Enter an email address, add an optional note, and send the invite. It also gives you a couple of additional sharing options: As with Google Docs, you can create folders in your account and share their contents with collaborators. Or, you can share a single document from within the document editor.

You might use folders to keep you work and personal files separate in your Paper account. If you’re going to share files with the same people over and over, sharing a folder saves you the time and effort of sharing each new document.

Colorful Comments: In your Dropbox Paper document, you can highlight a particular parts to add your comment to. Plus, it’s easy to reply to comments. In other words: You’ll feel right at home if you’ve used Google Docs a lot in the past. The Paper team even threw in some fun stickers to keep comments lively.

Dropbox Paper comments

Dropbox Paper also uses colored names (similar to Hackpad, below) to show who wrote what. If you’re working on a living document with a team of people, this can be handy when time passes and you can’t remember who had which idea.

Within your document, you can also use the @ sign before a team member’s name to call their attention to a comment. Similarly, you can reference another document or folder by typing + and its name.

Unobtrusive Table of Contents: Dropbox Paper automatically creates a table of contents based on the headings in your document. Although other writing apps can also do this, it’s implemented unobtrusively and automatically here. In other apps, you have to click a button in one of the menus to show the TOC, but Dropbox Paper shows very small lines on the left of the screen that you can just hover over to show the TOC. It’s out of the way when you don’t need it, but easy to get to when you do.

Linked to Your Dropbox Account: As you might expect, Dropbox Paper requires users to log in with their Dropbox account, so you’ll need to create one if you want to use the product. Paper isn’t mixed in with your Dropbox files, but, again, you can link to Dropbox files easily from within a Paper document. The good news is, at least for now, Paper documents don’t count towards your Dropbox storage quota.

Do note that Dropbox Paper doesn’t offer offline access. It’s possible Paper will add offline access in the future, but for now you’ll need an internet connection to create and edit documents. Depending on your workflow, this could be a dealbreaker.

Dropbox Paper Price: Free

 750words

750 words

750words is a free online journaling tool created by Buster Benson. The site is based on the idea of “Morning Pages”; a journaling tool Julia Cameron suggests in her creativity course The Artist’s Way. Cameron advises aspiring creatives to start each morning with three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing to clear away the mental clutter, leaving you with a clearer mind to face the day.

750 words is the three-page digital equivalent (assuming the average person writes 250 words per page) and lets you store all your journaling online. Each morning, you’ll receive a prompt asking you to write your 750 words, and the site keeps track of various statistics associated with your entries. The site uses a Regressive Imagery Dictionary to calculate the emotional content from your posts and provides feedback on features like your mood, and most commonly used words.

750 words is simple to set up and is ideal for anyone who finds it challenging to maintain a consistent journaling practice. The site uses a number of incentives to motivate users, including animal badges awarded to journalers who complete a certain number of days in a row, leader boards, and opt-in monthly challenges.

Conclusion

Collaborative Journal is an online-only journal that empowers you to find the inspiration, motivation, and support in friends in real time, in real life.

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