When I decided I didn’t want my personal journals stored on line, I looked for an off-line alternative to 750words.com.  Even though it didn’t fully meet my needs, I decided on Chronories.  In addition to having a place to capture my thoughts and observations each day, the app automatically captured some neat things like weather for my location,  computer program usage and on line time. It did not, however, have a word count mechanism, and it used a completely proprietary format.  (It looks like I may be able to export text entries, and I suspect that may be in a .pdf format, but I haven’t tried yet.  Something prompted me to check on it in the Mac App Store, and it wasn’t there!  I went to the website, and it wasn’t there! The company has all kinds of software, but they seem to have pulled this particular piece off the market. That rang a lot of alarm bells for me, and I decided to find another piece of software.  With the new year, I’ve rededicated to doing morning pages (three handwritten pages first things in the morning), except I do them when I first get a chance during the day, and I do them on the computer.  Yes, I know this breaks the theory behind Julia Cameron’s process, but, well, it works for me.

I spent New Year’s Day sampling various programs.  I’m not opposed to buying something in the Mac App Store (but for critical software, I’ve been leaning more and more to supporting developers who make their product available outside the Mac App Store.  First of all, they will usually give you a trial version which functions fully, but it time-limited.  Second of all, when updates are released, I can get them right away without having to wait for the update to wind it’s way through the App Store approval process.  I can usually tell within the first day or so if I’m going to be able to use a piece of software for what I need — usually faster than that.

I wanted the ability to export my entries in a variety of formats.  I wanted a word count feature.  I wanted it to automatically assign dates to my entries.  If I inserted images (I rarely, if ever, do), I wanted to be able to re-size those images.  Dropbox integration would be nice, but I can usually do that on my own, so I wasn’t too worried about that.  Yes, I know Dropbox stores the files on the web.  It’s a nice option for syncing with the laptop.

I looked at MiJournal, Memoires, Dossier, Day One, and MacJournal.  I looked at descriptions on several others, but I wasn’t moved to looking for a trial version.  I had to eliminate Day One, because they are Mac App Store only and didn’t have a trial version.  At least, I couldn’t find one on their limited web site, which essentially pointed to the Mac App Store.   Also, it doesn’t run on Snow Leopard, and my Mac Mini, until I upgrade the box, runs Snow Leopard (which I love as an operating system).

MiJournal and Memoires didn’t allow images to be resized, and, while they were nice apps, they just didn’t resonate with me.  I found Dossier, and removed both MiJournal and Memoires from my machine.

Then the decision came down to Dossier and MacJournal.  Both would do what I wanted them to do.  Both cost within $5 of each other.  Dossier is a much more robust program in that it’s more than a journaling program.  It’s clean, flexible, and has all the options I wanted.  In the end, it seems to do some of what Scrivener does as well as the things I wanted in the journaling app, but it’s really more of an app to organize documents — kind of a shell program (a really nice shell program, nonetheless), and I resist those.

That brought me to MacJournal.  It’s interface and Dossier’s look a lot alike.  I discovered a feature in MacJournal that sold me on it after I compared all the other features.  I can configure word count goals.  Like in Scrivener.  Scrivener didn’t work for me for journaling, simply because it didn’t create a file with the date and time in the header.  Isn’t that silly?  MacJournal does, and I have entered my word count goal for the year and each day’s goal is 750 words.  I have a tech support request in for some help on some configuration for it (which I think I’ve figured out), but I hear their tech support is excellent, and I decided to give it a try.

I can make multiple journals and can configure the program to upload blog entries if I want (I’m not sure I want to do that), but if I did decide to go that route, it would be nice to have a journal for each blog.   For now, I’ve configured a default color for the journal and it’s files as well as a worksheet background color to set it apart.

Another feature of the program which I don’t use often but a lot of people like is a distraction free full screen mode.  Default colors are green text on black screen (very retro), but you can also configure it in the WordPerfect color scheme, or a custom configuration.