Yesterday I upgraded to the latest version of Day One (1.7) on my Mac running Mountain Lion. As a result of that, I had to move my Journal.dayone file from ~/Dropbox/Application Support/Day One to its new location, at ~/Dropbox/Apps/Day One1. That move seemed to go fine, & Day One still worked without issue on my iPad. However, since that upgrade on my Mac, Day One had problems. The app opened, but the Journal didn’t. I could still use the menus, open Preferences, etc., but the Journal itself would not open. I tried the following, none of which worked:

  • Deleted ~/Dropbox/Apps/Day One/Journal.dayone & restored from a backup from before the move found at /Library/Application Support/Backup.
  • Deleted the Day One app & its associated files (except for the Journal) using AppCleaner, & then re-installed using the Mac App Store.
  • Uninstalled the Day One app & then deleted the bom & plist found at /var/db/receipts & then re-installed using the Mac App Store.
  • Uninstalled the Day One app, rebooted, & then re-installed using the MAS.
  • Moved Journal.dayone from ~/Dropbox/Apps/Day One/Journal.dayone & started the app.

Nothing worked. When I opened Day One, the app opened, but the Journal never appeared. I was sure the Journal itself wasn’t corrupt, as:

  • I was able to restore from a known good backup.
  • The app worked fine on my iPad.

So I was stuck. I emailed tech support for Day One, but it took them 5 days to get back to me, which did not leave me pleased. I tweeted them, & never got a reply. Finally, support emailed me back & pointed me to a support article on their site, which said to run the following on the command line:

$ defaults write com.dayoneapp.dayone PreviousBundleVersion 18
$ defaults write com.dayoneapp.dayone PreviousBundleString "1.7"

That fixed it. Now I can not only the Day One app, but also see & edit my entries. I’m still not happy with the technical support I received, but at least the app is usable again. Hopefully the company can regain my trust again over time.

  1. I had to make that move. Day One forces it if you want to keep using Dropbox.