The Journal on Bits du Jour

< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >

Posted by Chris Eller
Jul 9, 2010 at 02:10 PM

The Journal will be offered on Bits du Jour July 12 at a 50 percent discount. Here’s the link: http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/the-journal/
I have been on a journey to find my perfect writing tool for Windows. I had essentially landed between MyInfo and The Journal. There are features MyInfo has that probably nudge it in front of The Journal, but to be honest, they are very close for my needs. Clearly, the discounted price will seal the deal.

What I like about MyInfo is it seems more like a pure outliner/writing tool. It also has some nice features like hyperlinking at the paragraph level. The reason I hesitated with MyInfo concerns the development of the program. It appears a little hit and miss.

The developer for The Journal appears to be one of the major strengths of the application. He is very involved in the community surrounding his product and is open to user suggestions for future development. If there is one hesitation I have regarding The Journal, it involves management of the database. I work from multiple locations (work and home) and share time between a Windows OS at work and Mac OS at home. I use SugarSync to keep everything synchronized, but have had difficulty telling The Journal where I want my data files placed. Minor inconvenience.

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 9, 2010 at 08:49 PM

I have yet to find the perfect writing application for Windows, which is shocking, given how many more applications are written for Windows than for Mac. MyInfo and The Journal are both excellent applications—I’ve owned licenses for both over the years, still have an up-to-date one for MI. The deal breaker for me on both these programs (at least as writing applications) is the absence of extended selection in their editors. That is, you can’t double click on a word and, with the mouse button still depressed after the second click, drag to select whole words… Also, there is no extended selection for triple-click and selecting a whole paragraph (although in The Journal you can triple click to select a whole paragraph, but since the selection occurs after you release the mouse button, you can’t extend your selection to other whole paragraphs). Anyway, I have written about this too many times already in this forum and I’m sure others are tired of reading my complaints.

Steve

Posted by Chris Eller
Jul 12, 2010 at 03:37 PM

Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I have yet to find the perfect writing application for Windows,

I agree. This is complicated even more when you begin working with Scrivener and all of the capabilities it brings to the table and then transition back to a Windows world and try to find a similar application. Scrivener is not perfect, but I do like it a lot. :) This is where perfectionism raises its ugly head and we become frustrated because we cannot find the killer app.

Back to topic list