Introduction
Modern technology has changed many things from our everyday use. Books, writing, music are all this today has a very different view than 15-20 years ago. This fate touches personal diaries. Of course, people can also keep a diary in a variety of notebooks, but the smartphone can be a much more convenient tool for this task. Heyday is the diary application for iPhones. Someone can say that these programs have already appeared abound, but Heyday has something to surprise.
Consider, for example, a popular DayOne. DayOne allows sharing its notes, attaching thereto locations, tags. But looking at all of its capabilities globally, we see that the classic diary was only digitized, the revolution did not happen. After a couple of years something changed in the world of digital diaries. This change was the release of Heyday, which allows taking another look at the record-keeping of a personal nature. Heyday is a diary, which behaves itself. There is no need every day before going to bed to sit down and write down personal thoughts (Goldfisher, 2013). All the person has to do is to live, namely hanging out with friends, spending time with family, going to work. Pulling pictures and videos from the gallery, the application automatically creates collages of them, which show where and when a particular episode of the life was captured. People can add a description to these collages, write their thoughts about the day or the events experienced.
Origin
Hey, Inc. is the US developer of the free mobile application for iPnones, Heyday. It is a passionate team of generalists, who satisfies the world by creating software that improves individual experience. Every person of the team codes and donates on each level (Heyday, 2014). They launched it December 5, 2013. The application has been creating for 18 months in San Francisco, partially because it is engineered to provide users with the alternative to accumulate all private data they save only on their phone, rather than to store on the Hey’s servers (Gannez, 2013).
Interface and Functionality
The program will ask to register at first or to create a new account on the server or to use an existing one on the popular social network, Facebook. After people are offered to activate geolocation services to improve the program, and then people proceed to its immediate use.
The main screen of a Heyday is the tape of “moments”. And the film collects “moments” with all the photos taken on a smartphone. The person can just scroll down and remember the events that took place a few months or even a year ago.
At the beginning of the tape there is a block, on which random pictures with the time and date float all the time. If to tap on the picture it will be displayed on the entire screen. After that it can be edited or shared. If clicking on a date, it will allow moving on to this “moment”.
In fact, getting to the screen of the “moment”, the person gets to the application to work with collages. Here he can add or remove a photo and video from collage, rearrange them and edit. Hence, the collage can be shared on social networks, sent by e-mail or through messages.
Certainly, in the Heyday people can attach text notes to record, change the location and add photos. To add friends is of non-obvious functions of the application. If the person has experienced an event with his friends, it can be checked out (Coolmomtech, 2014).
At the top of the tape, there is always the panel with the date and the search button. Clicking on a date, the person will see a calendar with which he can go to the “moments” of any day. Search key leads to the screen “Explore”, where close friends, favorite places, and events that occurred a year ago appear. Heyday has only three settings, but it is enough.
Additionally, developers have taught the application to automatically select one of 18 filters for photos, make collages that can be shared in social networks or Instagram. Also, there is an opportunity to check in someone from friends on Facebook people met. This is convenient, especially if the person is an active user of social networks. Thus, it is possible to archive a day by a few clicks, without having to write anything down.
Heyday is able to remind about birthdays of friends, prompting a place, where the person can celebrate the holiday and so on. Using GPS is one of the most energy-intensive processes on a smartphone, but the developers say that optimized the program in such a way that its use affects the duration of battery life as less as possible.
The program has a very beautiful design. The disadvantage of the app is the lack of the possibility to set a password to enter the program. After all, entries in the diary people would like to keep private.
Impact
The article of Anthony Ha explains that Heyday helps people who have desired to have a physical paper, but never succeeded to find the time or inspiration to do so repeatedly. The app is less location concentrated and more integrated. If the life is boring, than people have the motivation to make it bright and interesting (Ha, 2013).
During some time of consumerization, a number of people have noted that after the removal of photos from the album, the photos or even places of removed photos are stored as black photos. It should be as if everything is synchronized. However, the app is great. It will do the job for the person. There is only need to write down a comment to the event. It is just the thing for lazy people who want to keep a diary.
Conclusion
The fact that modern life passes at a furious pace is very obvious. Many events, important and not so, dumped on people every day, but something interesting really somehow escapes from the memory. There are many different services or applications designed to compensate for the shortcomings of our memory, and Heyday for iPhone takes in their list one of the places of honor. Heyday practically does not require personal attention. It will gather all the information by itself and people will only enjoy the pleasant memories. The application is absolutely free and does not contain any internal purchases.
Heyday charm is that for storing important scenes from the life, there is no need to describe them every evening; the program will do it. In addition, the app offers good tools for doing all the usual text of the diary. All this together with a great design and good localization makes Heyday the leader among similar programs.
References
Coolmomtech (2014). Heyday app: An automatic digital journal that does the remembering for you. Retrieved May 12, 2014 from http://coolmomtech.com/2014/05/heyday-app-digital-journal/
Gannez, L. (2013). Heyday App Is a Journal of Your Life That Writes Itself. Retrieved December 5, 2013 from http://allthingsd.com/20131205/heyday-app-is-a-journal-of-your-life-that-writes-itself/
Goldfisher, A. (2013). Heyday app launches, reveals $2 mln in seed funding. Retrieved December 5, 2013 from https://www.pehub.com/2013/12/heyday-app-launches-reveals-2-mln-in-seed-funding/
Ha, A. (2013). Heyday, The New Journaling App, Reminds Me That I’m Kind Of Boring. Retrieved December 8, 2013 from http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/08/heyday-first-impressions/
Heyday (2014). About Hey. Retrieved from http://www.hey.co/about
