Short answers first. If something here doesn't cover it, email me — a real person reads it.
The + button covers a note, a journal entry, a link and a voice memo. Beyond that:
Markdown works in the editor: **bold**, # headings,
- lists.
Attach photos to any entry. If you add a photo that was taken on a different day, Moraine offers to date the entry when the photo was taken instead of today — useful when you are writing up a trip afterwards.
Search matches words and meaning. If you can't remember the words you used, describe the thing: "the argument about moving house" will find the entry even if none of those words appear in it. Meaning-based search is part of the purchase; keyword search always works.
Other ways in: Tags (a cloud or a ranked list), Map (where you captured things, if location is on), Calendar (what you wrote on a day, beside your diary), Photos (every picture as a wall), and Stats.
Occasionally an old entry surfaces at the top of the library — either an anniversary, or something you wrote years ago that is close in meaning to what you have been writing lately. Dismissing it hides it for the day.
Open an entry and choose Edit. The title, the writing, the date, the place and the tags are all yours to change.
**bold**,
# headings and - lists work; there is no
formatting toolbar and there will not be one. What you write stays plain
text that any app can open, which is the whole point of the export.Journals keep separate things separate — Work, Travel, whatever you like. Make them in Settings → Journals.
A journal can wear a theme: one complete look — accent, paper and typeface — that the app takes on while you are inside that journal, so Work and Travel are different rooms rather than the same room with a different dot. Pick one in Settings → Journals → the journal → Theme. There are nine; App theme means none, and no journal has one until you choose it.
It applies only while that journal is selected. All Entries, the Journals list and Settings keep the app's own look, and light or dark stays wherever you set it — a theme has both.
Entries arrive with their dates, tags, places, weather, favourites, photos, video and one voice memo each — an entry that held two keeps the first. If the export is named after a journal, Moraine offers to keep it as its own journal. Nothing is dropped quietly: every import leaves a receipt in your library — an entry that says how many came across and names, one by one, any file the export mentioned but didn't contain, with the date and first words of the entry it belonged to. It is searchable and it stays. If you export again from Day One and import that folder, entries already here are left alone and only the gaps the receipt named are filled.
Entries arrive with their dates, titles, writing, places, photos and video, and Moraine offers to keep them as their own journal. Journal entries are often a place and some pictures rather than writing, so a photo taken years before the entry keeps its own date and the entry keeps the day it was written.
Journal fills its export with things that are not photographs — maps, workout rings, contact cards. Those become the entry's place or a line of context instead of a library full of screenshots. Entries holding nothing but a map pin are left behind, and photos Journal itself could not export are counted: the result says how many of each rather than dropping them quietly.
Import is free and untimed. A large import then spends a while giving each entry a title, tags and its place in search — that part runs on your device, shows its progress, and can be paused.
Settings → Backup → Export everything writes a folder of plain
JSON with your photos and recordings beside it as ordinary files, and an
index.html that shows the whole library — entries, dates, places,
photographs, recordings — in any browser, with no app and no network. Open it on a
machine that has never had Moraine installed and it works, because it reads only the
files beside it. The folder's layout and every field in it are written down on the
Format page, so that someone else could write a reader
against it.
Export always works — during the trial, after it, bought or not. Restore from an export adds back anything missing and leaves what you already have alone, so restoring the same export twice is harmless.
Do this before you change devices, and before any big import. Moraine has no copy of your library, so nobody can recover it for you.
Snapshot to Files is the same export written straight to this device with no dialog: in Files under On My iPhone › Moraine › Snapshots, or the app's Documents folder on a Mac. The last three are kept; a fourth replaces the oldest. Settings says how long it has been since the last one, and starts to nag gently after a month. It is the copy that depends on neither iCloud nor this app nor a password.
Edit the same entry on your phone and your Mac while they are apart, and iCloud
has to pick one set of words when they meet. Moraine never lets that choice lose
anything: on the device whose words were replaced, they come back as a second
entry beside the first, titled Conflicted copy and tagged
#conflict, in the same journal on the same day. Nothing is merged and
nothing is guessed — you keep the one you want, or fold them together by hand.
Settings › iCloud sync also lists every entry that has changed on this device and
not yet reached iCloud, so you can see what is at stake before it syncs.
Export encrypted… is the same export sealed with a password into one file. Nobody who has the file can read it without the password — not Moraine, and not us. Restoring one asks for the password and is otherwise identical.
There is no way back in without the password. If you forget it, what is in the file is gone.
Save as PDF… sets your entries as a book: a cover, a contents, a chapter for each month, and your photographs on the page beside what you wrote. It asks what goes in before it writes anything:
A count under the pickers shows how many entries match, so you know what you are about to get. The title on the cover, and the file's name, say what was chosen — the journal, the year and the tags.
Print it from the share sheet, or from Preview on a Mac: the system does that better than an app can.
Settings → Appearance holds the app's own look: an accent colour, light or dark, a paper (the ground everything sits on), a typeface and a text size. Every accent has been checked for legibility on every paper, so there is no combination to avoid. Text size is a step up from whatever the system is already set to, so it never undoes a size you rely on. A journal's theme overrides all of this while you are in that journal.
Moraine syncs through your own iCloud account. Settings shows the current state at the top.
Everything works for 14 days. After that: capture, browsing, keyword search, import and export keep working. Generated titles, summaries and tags, search by meaning, related entries and resurfacing are what the purchase turns back on.
Anything captured while the app is locked isn't lost or half-processed — it waits, and is picked up the moment you buy.
One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac on the same Apple Account, and Family Sharing is on. On a new device: Settings → Restore purchase.
| Setting | Default | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Save location with captures | Off | Stores where you were, and enables the Map. |
| Save weather with captures | Off | Adds a weather snapshot. Needs location. |
| Look up films, books and music | Off | The only feature that tells a server anything about your capture — and only a title. See Privacy. |
| Require Face ID | Off | A privacy screen over the app, and hides it in the app switcher. |
Check Settings → Apple Intelligence. It needs a device that supports it, with it enabled in system settings. Without it, Moraine still titles and tags entries using a simpler on-device method. If the trial has ended, this is the part that unlocks with the purchase.
Settings → On-device models shows whether the speech model is installed. Tap Download models now if it isn't.
Entries need to have been indexed. After a large import that takes a while — the banner at the top of the library shows the progress. Settings → On-device models shows how much of the library is indexed.
Weather needs location switched on as well, and Apple's weather service can take around half an hour to start answering for a newly installed build.
chaser_90ragwort@icloud.com — bugs, requests, or anything that behaved unexpectedly. Saying which device and iOS or macOS version you are on saves a round trip.