The first update of 2026 is here!

This is something I've been working on over the last few months and is a brand new, and I hope really exciting feature set. I say feature set because today's update is just the beginning...

Introducing 'Trackers'.

This is a new subsystem on DearDiary which will let you track progress of things, or track trends of things in your life. Today I am releasing two simple trackers, a mood tracker and a sleep tracker.

My initial plan was to bring in different diary types and as such you would have a Sleep Tracker diary, or a Mood Tracker diary, or a generic diary. But I felt this would mean people would be forced into having multiple diaries in order to track trends in their lives and I didn't want to force this.

So we came up with what I call 'enhancements' which can be added to your diary. At the moment I only have plans for 'enhancements' to be trackers and the system is largely designed around this philosophy. But I'm sure someone in the future will let me know they'd like a certain 'enhancement' that I haven't even considered and will need to bend the code to fit :-)

These trackers are enabled on a per diary basis - as you can see above. To enable a tracker (or any number of trackers) on your diary, click the various Diary Settings buttons throughout the app to bring up the Diary Settings window.

Switch on the tracker(s) you want and select who you want to be able to see the information. Remember DearDiary security always takes the most restrictive approach, so if you choose Private then ONLY YOU can see the tracker data even if your diary or entry is public.

Tracker data is associated with entry data. That is, you can only have one mood tracker data entered per entry. But you can have multiple entries per day, so if your mood changes and you want to track it, add a new entry - and maybe the entry text should contain why you're now in a different mood.

For each tracker that's enabled you'll see a small hover window at the top of your entry. When creating a new entry or editing an existing one this hovering window is changeable. If you're visiting someone's diary who has tracker data for that entry and it's visible to the public, it'll show in the top left corner of the entry in the same way.

The current mood tracker also updates your entry title in the Latest Updates to present an icon indicating your mood for that entry, if your tracker data is set to Public.

Once you enable a tracker you'll see a new chart box on your dashboard which will give you all the trend data available for your enabled trackers. Only YOU can see the trend data at this time regardless of the privacy setting for that tracker. This can help you to track your moods, or your sleep over time and see whether journalling is really helping you!

I have plans for quite a few more (more complex!) trackers over the coming months. The current two trackers are available to all Diarists. The more complex ones may be available only to Plus Members but no decision has been firmly made on this yet.

I am investigating how to get Apple and Android users data from their Health Apps into the Sleep Tracker but at the moment you'll need to do it manually. I have no timeframe for when (or even if) this will become possible, but I intend to look into it.

As always, any issues please let me know, and of course, let me know your thoughts.

Steve.