MacJournal
by
Ronda Yoder
MacJournal
3.2.1 is a software program
that allows you to keep a record of your thoughts and activities in
an organized, searchable file. This is another way of saving
memories, as often as you want. You can write hourly, daily,
weekly, or any combination. You can have different journals for
different purposes, such as business recordkeeping, diaries, great
thoughts, poetry, or whatever your heart and mind can imagine.
System 10.2 or above required and you must have Safari installed
even if you don’t use it as your browser.
This is clearly a
Macintosh program, and it implements functions from Mac OSX that
make you feel at home with the program very quickly, such as a
drawer for entries, as in Mail & Preview. The program is
configurable and customizable in many ways. You can add music and
pictures to your journal. You can quickly upload your journal
entries to a blogging website, if you want to share your thoughts
with others. The application is compatible with most of the online
blogs: LiveJournal, WordPress, Blogger and others. If you prefer to
write only for yourself, you can maintain the security of your
journal on your own computer with password protection or AES-256
encryption.
The software provides Entry Keywords to organize the entries. Since
all the words in the journals are searchable, you can easily find
topics that you journaled in the past. You can also use direct
links within the entries to link from one entry to another; these
are called wiki-style links. By putting the name of a previous
entry in the text of a new entry, the software will automatically
convert that text to a link, so you can go to the previous entry.
The software also allows you to enter smileys as text, which are
automatically converted to the picture smileys, i.e. :)
becomes J. The journal files can
be exported to Microsoft Word, RTF and HTML in addition to other
formats, which gives you a lot of options for how to use the
journals. Spell check and automatic backups are other features that
enhance the program. There is a fun feature, The Taco, which will
offer you quotes of a classical or silly nature when “asked.”
This is a well-written, useful program that would be a great help
to journalers. The only minor drawback that I found was that the
Help file didn’t use Mac Help format, but a PDF format. It is still
fully searchable, but perhaps doesn’t have the ease of use of Mac
Help.
For those who are multilingual, the software comes in 13 languages
and is available directly from the manufacturer, Mariner Software
at www.marinersoftware.com. The boxed version
costs $29.95 and the download is $24.95. A family 5 pack sells for
$99.95.