In January, I mentioned I chose MacJournal6 as a new electronic journaling application.  I’ve been using it every day since January 1st.  It has iPad and iPhone apps, but I have not tried them.  I prefer to do my journaling from a full size keyboard.  While I have a Bluetooth keyboard that works very well on the iPad and the iPhone, I’ve chosen not to pursue that route for now.  I have other mobile options that work well for this exercise.  I use my MacBook Air.

What I do to synchronize my MacJournal database (that’s what it is) is store it in Dropbox. The key to not corrupting this database is to ensure you never open the file simultaneously on more than one computer.  This means if you are on Mac OS X Lion or higher, you cannot use the “open where I left off” feature (or whatever it’s called), because doing that leaves a marker that the database is still open.  You want to ensure your database is closed up nicely and cleanly each and every time.  If you can do this, you can use Dropbox to keep you MacJournal database safe (this is also true if you use Scrivener).  If you cannot do this because you’re “bad at closing things out,” do not use this method.

You can set up as many journals as you like.  I have three so far.  One, of course, is titled Morning Pages where I studiously type my 750 words each day of anything that comes into my head.  It’s usually something related to whatever is going on in our lives or the world that day.  The whole purpose of morning pages is to empty your head and get words flowing.  If you’re a devotee of Getting Things Done, you know this is the first step to getting organized.  Get everything out of your head and into a system so your brain doesn’t have to keep track of it. That frees you up to be creative. If you don’t trust other people to stay out of your stuff, you can password protect your file.

The other journal I’ve established is for the A to Z Blog Challenge.  I’m doing one official and one unofficial entry this year, and I’ve planned my entries.  If I get back to work on it, I’ll have some of my entries written in advance, so I can schedule their posting.  I’ve slacked off on working on this and April is rapidly approaching.  Oops.

Finally, the third journal is devoted to documenting the feral kittens.  I haven’t kept this up as much as I should, but as most of you have seen, I have a few blog entries to help with this.

Other than being able to set up multiple journals, what’s the big deal?  I can color code each journal to help them stand out.  There are a number of properties I can use to customize each journal.  For instance, I use a cream colored background on the Morning Pages journal and a light green background on the A to Z Blog Challenge journal. The kittens’ journal pages are stark white (maybe I should change them to a different shade to make it more conducive to type there?). You can also choose an icon to represent each journal, including adding your own (but I haven’t figured out how to do that — there seems to be a file type I need to know to look for).  Also, you can customize the template — another feature I haven’t begun to explore.  If you’re using MacJournal to post to a blog, you can customize that information as well.  I do use the WordCount goal feature.

I was hoping to set it up for 750 words per day with it keeping a cumulative count for the year.  I wrote to MacJournal to ask how to do that, but by the time I heard back from them that what I wanted to do couldn’t be done with the software, (they were very apologetic for taking so long — they didn’t offer any excuses, and they were professional) I’d figured out what does work. In case you want to do that for yourself, the answer is to calculate what your total word count for the journal should be, in my case, 750 words per day for 365 days.  That rounds up to 274,000 words, so that was the goal I inserted into the journal word count properties.  In the bottom of each journal entry, I see a progress bar with today’s word count on the left and the cumulative goal on the right.  I know I want to hit 750 words each day, so that count is what I look for.  I just don’t get a cute progress bar for the day’s entry.  I do get a nice progress bar for my year of Morning Pages.  It’s not obvious at first, but anytime I want a cumulative count for the year (or for the journal) I click on the left hand number, and it toggles to the cumulative count (the sum of each journal entry).  This works very well for what I wanted, and the MacJournal people kindly wrote to tell me they were adding my method to their help files in case they got another question similar to mine.

I’m not doing this program justice, because it can do so much more than what I’m using it for.  It strikes me as a good option for people looking at Scrivener but who are put off by learning all the things it can do.

I created a flyer for the kittens by inserting and resizing photos by drag and drop.  That was dragging and dropping the photo and dragging to resize. Very easy.  They’re growing, so I’m going to have to create another flyer soon.  When the clinic wanted it digitized, I saved it to .pdf and emailed it to them, saving them from having to scan the one I put up at the clinic.

There’s a handy “Stats” button in the program header.  When I click on it, it performs a quick analysis and tells me words in this entry; characters in this entry; lines in this entry; total words in entries; entries tallied; average words per entry; and concludes with a word frequency chart.  Most of this is mundane, but I’ll note my husband’s name comes first.  Rossie is the third name mentioned followed by Floyd.

President Obama and I have something in common.  After I filtered out the “common” words, “I” appears most often.  I have an excuse.  Morning Pages is all about me.  In his position, the president is supposed to be about “we” (at least in his public discussions — in private, he can be as much about himself as he likes).

If you’re on a Mac and looking for some alternative writing software to the usual suspects, investigate MacJournal’s website and install the free 30 day trial to see if it’s for you.