Product Reviews

Conservatively billed as a program to manage journals and diaries, Mariner Software's MacJournal will appeal to a much wider audience. Basically, anyone who needs to gather their thoughts, or let others know them, will find this a useful tool. Although there are flaws in this first commercial release of the program, many will still find it a great writing and management tool.

At its heart, MacJournal 3 is an information organiser that gathers related notes and jottings as entries in journals. Entries are edited in the main Entry window and organised into journals through a pull-out Journals drawer.

The program's outstanding feature is the ease with which it absorbs information. For example, if you pull a Word file from the desktop to the Journals drawer, its name is automatically added the list of entries underneath, while its contents are displayed in the main Entry window. The contents of web pages can also be dragged to an entry, with links remaining intact. You can also drag images into the Entry window, although there's no way to resize them.

Although the program's skimpy documentation doesn't make it clear enough, you can also create relational links to local files by dragging a file from the desktop to an Entry window rather than the Journal drawer. This displays a clickable local link instead of a copy of the file's content.

If you're editing a journal directly, MacJournal boasts a mix of useful

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and quirky word processing tools. It adopts Mac OS X's powerful text-editing features, including its built-in spell checker. However, the program's excellent numbered list tool is a gem and will surely be coveted by many word processors. A stranger inclusion is a Statistics feature, which takes the idea of a word count to the extreme by not only tallying the number of words in an entry, but offering a graphical display of the frequency at which they occur.

MacJournal does an admirable job of managing information. Entry titles are listed under journals in the drawer, and clicking on the journal's icon displays a numbered, hyperlinked navigational display of its constituent entries in the Entry window. This can then be exported as a single document to a number of formats, including RTF, Word or HTML. Usefully, you can edit the underlying HTML template, although there's no built-in way to upload such exported pages directly to a website.

Just as importantly, you can retrieve information quickly. If you use MacJournal to gather disparate information, you'll probably find that on its own, grouping entries under journals is too prescriptive, even if you can easily drag entries between journals. MacJournal's ability to allocate keywords to entries adds value to the program's Toolbar-based search pane, and allows you to speedily scan the text of journal contents by topic, keyword and date.

Nowadays, the most popular form of journal is probably the blog, and so MacJournal can upload journal entries to popular blog engines, including LiveJournal and Blogger. However, the program has limitations as a blog editor. It only uploads text and scrimps on editing features: if you locally edit an existing entry, the original isn't overwritten online. This is exacerbated by the fact that MacJournal doesn't import existing blog entries, so you'll never see the duplication locally.

However, although MacJournal 3.0.1's blogging functions need work, it's otherwise a polished and versatile way to track your life.