Alaskan Apple Users Group Blog

by Dave Enders ,AAUG Member

MacJournal 5 is a journalling application revamped for Leopard that allows any kind of content from text, PDF, Quicktime movies and images. It allows for multiple journals which can have the option to be password protected and AES 256 bit encrypted. This should be plenty to keep prying eyes from your journals if desired.

A nice feature of MacJournal is that you can import text, pdf files , images , audio and movies into your journal entries. I was able to paste, drag and drop and use the File->Import to bring these items into MacJournal. I would like to see a media browser added instead of doing the File-Import method. It would make it more consistent with Apple and third party applications while making it easier to use. Images that are placed in journal entries can be sized by percentage or by dragging the corner of the image. I found that pdf’s can also be scaled once brought into MacJournal.

MacJournal offers all the benefits of rich text editing such as bold , underline,italics etc. I did like was the Paste and Match Style feature which forces the text you are pasting to take the attributes of the paragraph that it is being inserting into. The Edit menu offered the following options for journal entries.

- Date and Time
- Checkbox
- Link (similar to the html tag)
- iTunes Artist and Song (currently playing)
- Safari Address (current Safari website)

You can also record audio and video for journal entries. This is not enabled by default. It can be activated under the View Menu -> Show Recording Bar

The Format->CleanUp menu offers some specialized commands to help your journal editing. A screen shot can be seen here.

You have the option to email entires, however for some odd reason and the manual states this is an OS X limitation, none of your rich text or html links will be sent in the email. I am not sure why this is, since other apps seem to be able to do it. This is a limiting factor in my opinion.

MacJournal is 100% Accessibility-supported. Learn more about compliancy on Voluntary Product Accessibility here!
There is a manual in pdf format that is 84 pages long and does a pretty good job of describing the features of MacJournal. I liked the fact that they recognize software is not bug free and describe the method for reporting bugs to Mariner Software. Also, since these journals could represent many hours of work the location of these journals are provided. This location is ~/Library/Application Support/MacJournal/ . This is backed up by TimeMachine (if you are using it) or you could use your favorite backup utility.

I was interested in checking out MacJournal for its ability to export to blogs. It supports Live Journal, MoveableType, Word Press, TypePad and Blogger. It seems they pretty much have the bases covered here supporting the most popular blogging sites. I was able to setup and export to my WordPress blog very easily. This would be an ideal situation where you are traveling and blogging on your MacBook and when you reach a destination where you have internet access you can upload your entries. Although MacJournal supports rich text not all these font styles may transfer to your blog, so try it out before you start posting. My recording video from my iSight camera would not be transferred to my blog. It would be good to have it create an embedded html reference for this video so it could be uploaded to your blog. I was able to copy embedded inks from YouTube and paste them into my macJournal entries and have them appear on my blog.

MacJournal also supports .mac and iWeb. I was less than successful getting my entires from my journal to work correctly. I realize serious bloggers are probably not using .mac or iWeb for blogging therefore this maybe a non-issue. However, It is my opinion that these restrictions be documented in the manual.

Something that is missing from the website and the manual is that MacJournal has an Applescript dictionary. I am confused to as why this is not documented unless it is currently unsupported.

This covers some of the features that I thought make MacJournal unique. I encourage you to download the trial and see for yourself if it is for you.

I think MacJornal is a solid product. Version 5 is only available in English at the moment. I hope that it continues to be developed to further enhance the email and blogging capabilities. Until then I give it 4 Moose.