Journler

Just found a great application called Journler, click on the picture for a larger view. I recently heard it had undergone some changes so I downloaded it and started playing around. It's good for a daily journal or diary but even more than that is it can sort things into various Smart Folders as well as preserve links to files, images and web sites. You can really organize ideas with this thing. I'm writing this in it and in the resources panel to the right I put both images and the web site link, and it will also take audio and video files. This would be great it you are doing research.

My needs are simple, I just want to keep track of things. Like when I first use a new contact lens. They're supposed to last 30 days but after a week (I think) I completely lose track and have no idea when to expect it to go bad or if I'm getting more or less wear out of it. Same for flea stuff on the cats. Darcy just told me it has been over a month since I put it on, supposed to be once a month but I'm sure I only do it every three months. But I can write it in Journler when I do something then do a search for it and have an exact and reliable record.

It actually is much more powerful than that but since it's free I can use it anyway. Maybe I'll think of new ways to use it later. For notes I already have Yojimbo, which is great, so I don't need that. Writing blogs? Supposed to be able to publish a blog right from the app but I haven't found a program yet that can do that as well as Blogger itself. Hard to believe it's free, it's almost as powerful and feature filled as Yojimbo and I paid $40 for that one.

One serious limitation is it doesn't sync through .mac like Yojimbo does to keep work and home computers the same, but it does have an alternative. I copied its data folder out of Library/Application Support to my external hard drive, which is portable and I take back and forth to work every day. I then opened Journler and it asked me to locate the database and I selected it on the external. So I just arrived at work and copied the app over to the Applications Folder and the preference to Preferences Folder, started up Journler and everything I did over the weekend was right there. Which is very cool, maybe even better than .mac syncing. I just have to make sure I never forget the external.