Review of viJournal Lite by SkoobySoft

viJournal Lite is a diary and journalling application for the Mac. It has a Universal Binary and supports the latest versions of OS X. It is a free version of ScoobySoft's viJournal.

Overall, viJournal Lite is simple and elegant. It supports everything I was looking for in a lightweight journalling application with no clutter and no unnecessary features. There are a small number of minor interface inconveniences, but the GUI is otherwise straightforward. As an advertisement for their commercial product, I have to say I am considering buying.

Major Features:

viJournal Lite, unsurprisingly, allows you to make journal entries. You can make two types of entries: you can make dated entries with a subject or you can just enter text into the day's notes field. Both are easy to do. Making an entry with a subject requires clicking on a plus sign at the top of the viewing window or hitting Apple-N. You are allowed to edit the date of the entry, which is useful when transcribing handwritten notes. You can add to the day's notes field by simply clicking in a text box. basic formatting is supported along with images, so this application can double as a lightweight scrapbook.

A tree of individual entries appears at the left of the window. A button at the bottom left brings out a calendar view with day having entries highlighted. Clicking on a day shows you the appropriate entries. A slight inconvenience is that you cannot double-click on a day to make a new entry for that date. Instead, you must use the calendar control in the new entry dialog.

You can create multiple named journals and switch through them by clicking on tabs at the top of the window.

Other Features and Notes

This constitutes 99% of the features I use. The remaining features are tucked away in menus or the preferences. Encryption and password protection are supported to protect your journal. The interface can appear with or without the brushed metal appearance. You can control where to save the journal(s). There is a mode for transcribing written journals which automatically advances the date for each entry. The preferences are well organized, thorough, but not excessive.

There is an occasional glitch where switching away from the preferences pane and back makes the tabs at the top of the pane go away. Another annoyance is that after closing the window, clicking on the vJournal Dock icon does ot bring it back. Instead, you must go through the Window menu.

Commercial Version

The commercial version, viJournal, supports easy HTML/PDF export, syncing journals between computers, more multimedia support, support for blogging, clipping, email integration, and so forth. At $19.95, it looks like a good buy.

 

 

 

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Found some idiosyncrasies while continuing to play with the program:

1) No Spotlight integration. If I search for "landlord" in spotlight, I do not get appropriate journal entries in vijournal. The developer says that the commercial version does not support it either, but it is on the wish list for the next version. vijournal files are packages, and spotlight has trouble with them. I know C&P Notebook had similar issues.

2) No easy "Go To Today" feature to type notes into the Today's Notes box. In fact, you have to create an entry with or without a subject to get to the general notes for the day, or at least, as far as I can see. Until now, I have been mostly creating entries with subjects and did not notice the odd behavior. You cannot, for instance, just click on today in the calendar and start typing.

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