Keep Track Of The Places You Go And Things You Do With Ohai For App.net

Ohai for App.net ($4.99) by Villainware is your journal for remembering where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. While you could always just use something like Day One, Ohai is designed specifically for location.

Since Ohai is an App.net app, you will need at least a free account to use Ohai. If you haven’t done so yet, you can sign up for ADN with this link. Once you are logged in, Ohai will greet you with a beautiful animation of a leather-bound journal opening up, leaving you to fill in the blank pages.

Each day will become a “page” in Ohai, and you can navigate between them by swiping left and right to turn the page. If you turn all the way to the front of the book, you will find the Acknowledgements page, and the very last page will always be About the Author, which will show your profile picture, username, and biography as it is shown on ADN.

While I have not been a big fan of skeuomorphism in the past, I have to admit, it’s really well done in Ohai. Since the app wants to be your location journal basically, it is only fitting. The only real skeuomorphic element to the app is the leather-bound cover that you first see, and then the page turning, but other than that, the app is pretty minimal in nature. I found the animations in Ohai to be absolutely delightful, as it was incredibly smooth and fluid, and everything has been responsive (including developer support).

When you’re ready to check in, all you have to do is tap on the “Tap to Check In” button. Doing this will bring up the Places screen, which will show a list of all nearby places from your current position, and all of them will be shown with interactive markers on the map (you can tap on them to view the place). Of course, since there will be a lot of places, you can also search for specific locales. I wish that Ohai would search in real-time, but you must manually submit the query before results are shown.

If you can’t find the place you’re looking for, there is also the option of adding it manually by tapping on the + button. You will see your current location as a blue dot on the map, and then you need to long-tap to drop a purple pin down. From here, tap on the blue arrow button, and you’re able to give the place a name and manually edit the address if need be.

Once you have a place, you can then write a comment to go along with the check-in, which can actually be as long as you want it to be. You can also attach a photo to it, which can be taken as a new image or imported from the Photo Library. Your checkin can then be shared with ADN or Twitter (comments will be cut off accordingly if they are too long for the selected social network), or you can keep it private by only selecting the Journal option.

Once you start accumulating checkins, they will appear in a timeline fashion on the day’s page, with the oldest checkin at the top. While I understand the meaning of this (chronological order from top to bottom), it can be a little annoying to not have the Tap to Check In button always at the top of the screen. On a day with a lot of check-ins, you will need to always scroll down to add a new one, which means more steps. I would like to see the option to reverse the timeline order, with newest on top with the Check-In button. I think having a “Jump to date” button or search option would be nice, instead of manually flipping through pages to go back to a specific date or finding a certain location.

I enjoy having the map always at the top of the page for each day, though, as it’s a great way to see the area I’ve covered in a 24-hour period.

If you’re worried about what will happen to your data if you end up deleting Ohai and then reinstalling it later, don’t! Thanks to ADN’s file storage, all of your data in Ohai will be stored securely on ADN’s servers, so all you have to do is login to Ohai and everything will remain intact.

So far, I have been enjoying using Ohai to record the places that I have been. It’s simple, fast, and a great way to checkin to places without letting others always see, such as Foursquare (private checkins are still somewhat visible to your Foursquare friends).

However, I have experienced a bug where if you checkin without a comment or photo, it will not actually show up on your timeline, although it is saved on your account. I also wish that the “Add Place” feature allowed me to add a new location directly on my current position as well. I’ve spoken with the developer and both of these issues will be fixed in a future update.

Despite these minor flaws at the moment, I’ve still be enjoying Ohai for App.net. I recommend checking it out if you’ve always wanted to log your daily path of activity without much effort, and it’s also a great use of the ADN API.

You can find Ohai for App.net in the iPhone App Store for $4.99. An App.net account is required.