Hi everybody,

I haven't been on for a while -- every time I come, I think I should be here more. Great information.

I was wondering if anyone knows of a good journal program for Windows. I'm looking for something really simple with a couple of must-have features: automatic time stamping, a tag field for each journal entry, a tag filter with a full set of boolean operators, a grid control that can show entries sorted reverse chronologically, free-form text search, and an open file format. It would also be nice to be able to group tags into categories. Does such a thing exist?

Thanks very much for any recommendations.

Tom

P.S. The text of the journal entries need to be presented in one view, with a separator between each entry and a scrollbar that takes you from top to bottom of the entire collection of entries that match the current tag filter expression (if a filter is active).

Tom,

I don't think you should restrict yourself to just journaling programs. You may find that the application that best suits your needs is a fuller information processor. I can't say if any of the following recommendations have all the features you're looking for, but I would suggest you investigate them:

The Journal (www.davidrm.com) allows you to tag sections of text within any entry as topics.

Debrief (www.debriefnotes.com) is a full Information Management suite, but could easily be used for simple journaling.

Evernote (www.evernote.com) could be used very successfully for journaling.

MyInfo (www.milenix.com/) may actually come closest to meeting all your needs as it allows tagging and a tabular interface where you can sort by any of the columns.

I hope this is helpful.

Happy New Year!

Steve Z.

Tom Nantais wrote:

I was wondering if anyone knows of a good journal
program for Windows. I'm looking for something really simple with a couple of
must-have features: automatic time stamping, a tag field for each journal entry, a
tag filter with a full set of boolean operators, a grid control that can show entries
sorted reverse chronologically, free-form text search, and an open file format. It
would also be nice to be able to group tags into categories. Does such a thing
exist?

Interesting that you should ask this right now- I'm wrestling with the same question myself. I don't know of anything that meets all of your criteria, but I'm sure there are others who know far more than I do, and I will be watching this thread closely.

I've been using ECCO to keep my journal for years, but have finally felt the urge to look for something more up-to-date. Having recently decided, despite some misgivings, to migrate day-to-day PIM operations to Outlook 2007, I'm looking for something that integrates more closely with Outlook.

Some thoughts-

Essential PIM has a very nice Notes function that would make a dandy journal.

"The Journal" looks like a very interesting piece of software, but it appears to be more elaborate for my purposes.

Right now I've narrowed my own choices down to either MyInfo or Evernote.

MyInfo is a great Swiss Army Knife sort of info manager, and could certainly be employed very effectively for a journal. You'd have all the tagging and search capability you could ask for. I use it for dozens of other functions, so why not one more? The downside is that MyInfo is slow to open and to save, giving it a somewhat unwieldy feeling that's not conducive to jotting down quick thoughts. Also, as a 2-pane outliner, you can only look at one entry at a time. I'm used to quickly scanning down the page in ECCO, and hate to give up that convenience.

I'm not a huge Evernote fan overall, because I find its "tape roll" design limiting, and the general interface way too quirky and inconvenient to use. However, it is a powerful program, and a journal is one task where the toilet paper paradigm actually does seem to make sense. Throw in its excellent categorization capability, and I think Evernote has real potential for my purposes.

Bob Mackreth wrote:

The downside is that MyInfo is slow to open and to save, giving it a somewhat
unwieldy feeling that's not conducive to jotting down quick thoughts. Also, as a
2-pane outliner, you can only look at one entry at a time. I'm used to quickly scanning
down the page in ECCO, and hate to give up that convenience.

You really should take another look at Debrief. You make your entries in individual notes, but can view them in a concatenated window.

Steve Z.

Bob, I have used various programs for journalling.

I like MyInfo for the reason that Steve has mentioned.

Evernote kind of leaves me cold, though I am intrigued by its design.

UltraRecall has the ability to time/date stamp entries, and I believe there is a year template that you assign the year to -- it already has months in place. There is a special search function as part of the year folder.

The Journal is quite nice, and offers features you may not need...but if you decide to get a more involvled journalling process, ie. a personal journal, a business journal, a fitness journal, a dream journal, etc., or a place where you can work on personal reflections that may not be tied to date, it is ideal. The program has grown nicely over the last few years, and is quite polished.

Zoot, of course, is also ideal. And you can have more than one day's entry open at a time.

From what you write you might prefer to have each journal dated for a week so you can scroll throigh the days.

Daly

Bob Mackreth wrote:

Tom Nantais wrote:

>I was wondering if anyone knows of a good journal
>program
for Windows. I'm looking for something really simple with a couple of
>must-have
features: automatic time stamping, a tag field for each journal entry, a
>tag filter
with a full set of boolean operators, a grid control that can show entries
>sorted
reverse chronologically, free-form text search, and an open file format. It
>would
also be nice to be able to group tags into categories. Does such a thing

>exist?

Interesting that you should ask this right now- I'm wrestling with the
same question myself. I don't know of anything that meets all of your criteria, but I'm
sure there are others who know far more than I do, and I will be watching this thread
closely.

I've been using ECCO to keep my journal for years, but have finally felt the
urge to look for something more up-to-date. Having recently decided, despite some
misgivings, to migrate day-to-day PIM operations to Outlook 2007, I'm looking for
something that integrates more closely with Outlook.

Some thoughts-

Essential
PIM has a very nice Notes function that would make a dandy journal.

"The Journal"
looks like a very interesting piece of software, but it appears to be more elaborate
for my purposes.

Right now I've narrowed my own choices down to either MyInfo or
Evernote.

MyInfo is a great Swiss Army Knife sort of info manager, and could
certainly be employed very effectively for a journal. You'd have all the tagging and
search capability you could ask for. I use it for dozens of other functions, so why not
one more? The downside is that MyInfo is slow to open and to save, giving it a somewhat
unwieldy feeling that's not conducive to jotting down quick thoughts. Also, as a
2-pane outliner, you can only look at one entry at a time. I'm used to quickly scanning
down the page in ECCO, and hate to give up that convenience.

I'm not a huge Evernote
fan overall, because I find its "tape roll" design limiting, and the general
interface way too quirky and inconvenient to use. However, it is a powerful program,
and a journal is one task where the toilet paper paradigm actually does seem to make
sense. Throw in its excellent categorization capability, and I think Evernote has
real potential for my purposes.

I seem to recall that when DeBrief was first discussed in this forum, a number of people found bugs or other disenchantments in it. Have these now been addressed?

-c

Cassius wrote:

I seem to recall that when DeBrief was first discussed in this forum, a number of people
found bugs or other disenchantments in it. Have these now been addressed?

-c

I use Debrief somewhat regularly and I haven't found any bugs. Some of the issues that others didn't like -- if I remember correctly -- included too busy an interface. This has not been addressed, although I can't say I find it too busy, although it also isn't all that intuitive, either. I don't recall the other disenchantments.

The major negative for Debrief that I see is that it does not have a facility for capturing information from other sources, other than the old cut and paste. It facilitates this a little bit by allowing you to open a notes window that can floats over any other open windows.

I don't use Debrief more because its functions are redundant to other programs I'm more familiar with. However, if I were starting from scratch -- say looking for a Journal program -- I would give Debrief a serious try.

Steve Z.

These look like excellent suggestions. Thanks very much. I agree that EverNote has just about everything I was looking for. Like a few have said, I'm not sure about the interface -- I was picturing something much simpler than a tree for associating tags with a note (e.g., an edit control with a drop down prediction window, like a browser's address bar). I'll try it out -- maybe it's not that important. I'm just picturing the tree getting very busy with even a moderate number of tags. I'll list all of the other suggestions and look at the websites, but I wanted to say thanks right away.

Regards,
Tom

I use JournalPro. It's here: http://www.dsrtech.net/ .

gB-)

Tom Nantais wrote:

These look like excellent suggestions. Thanks very much. I agree that EverNote has
just about everything I was looking for. Like a few have said, I'm not sure about the
interface -- I was picturing something much simpler than a tree for associating tags
with a note (e.g., an edit control with a drop down prediction window, like a browser's
address bar). I'll try it out -- maybe it's not that important. I'm just picturing the
tree getting very busy with even a moderate number of tags.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the Evernote tree has the ability to nest categories outline style, which would help you to to minimize the "tree getting very busy" problem .

Another good thing about the program is that it is free. :)

At least I find the free version perfectly adequate for the purpose of a journal.... as I mentioned upthread, I'm not a big fan of the program for all-around use, but it does seem to have excellent potential for use as a journal.