I’ve kept a journal for about three years now. I love using it to write down my thoughts and feelings, to record the results of my latest cooking experiment, and to set and track personal and professional goals. I would be lying to say that I always look forward to writing in it (writing is hard!), but every time I leave it for several days, I miss it, and come right back. Despite a few lapses, keeping my journal is crucial to my continuing development as a human being. My AP English teacher in high school said to us: “if it isn’t written down, it didn’t really happen.” That quotation means more and more to me, as my life explodes into more complex and wonderful dimensions, and has become too expansive for my memory to contain it. Journaling helps me record and remember my thoughts and feelings, on mundane days as well as extraordinary ones.

After searching for a great journal app for my then-new MacBook, I eventually settled on Journler. I really wish Journler was still in active development. It was a great application, with an extensive feature set and a simple, elegant interface. It fit my needs perfectly. Unfortunately, the developer went in another direction in life, and decided, painfully, to abandon the product. When Apple released Snow Leopard, Journler wasn’t updated, and I and many people faced some problems. I used Journler all the time, and it took a lot of experimentation and soul-searching to find a new journal application.

My needs are very simple: journaling, note-taking, blog drafting, and recipe-recording. Entry dates are very important, and tagging is useful, too. I wasn’t looking for a data dumping ground, which a lot of the alternatives end up being. I want a writing app. I use Evernote for work notes, and I don’t care for its interface, so that was out. Devon Think, Together, Yojimbo, and other paid apps were too expensive for my tastes, and seemed too complex for my needs.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon MacJournal, which is an excellent replacement for the moribund Journler. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have purchased MacJournal because Journler still works in Snow Leopard, albeit with some bugs, but as part of a $20 app bundle, it was a steal, and I snapped it up happily.

MacJournal, Customized to my Preferences

I exported my Journler entries (using Journler) and imported them into MacJournal without any problems, and started journaling with it right away. So far, I like MacJournal, and I have a much better feeling that it will survive for the next few years or so. I wrote over 1,300 Journler entries over the past few years, and I will miss the software dearly. It had the best interface, really easy but sophisticated tagging features (which I barely used), and extensive AppleScript features (which I never used). Still, it was a tightly designed and very powerful editor and journal.

MacJournal is far simpler in appearance than Journler, but it promises the same fancy journaling options, such as recording video and audio entries, blogging, and capturing all manner of outside content. It starts far more quickly than Journler does, which I attribute to the code being newer and perhaps less tangled. It handles editing simple lists far better than Journler does, too, thanks to a nice “List Style” toolbar button. You do have to customize the app’s toolbar to make it useful for editing, though. The boldface, italics, list style, and tag functions are all left out of the default toolbar, but you can easily add them. The search function works very well.

I figured out that I can customize the “Info Bar” via the View menu, which lets me see and edit not only the title (called “Topic”) of the entry, but the data and tags, just like in Journler. Each tag does not turn into its very own drop down, as it does in Journler, but that’s perfectly acceptable. I like the idea of tagging, but I tend to use it far more effectively while blogging, as opposed to journaling.

I tested its blogging capabilities with my WordPress blog. It published my post immediately, without a hitch. That said, it isn’t really a blogging tool. It lacks the option to post as a draft, and doesn’t offer much in the way of formatting and layout options. I’ll stick with copy, paste, and edit in WordPress.

All in all, though, MacJournal is an excellent program if you wish to keep a journal on your Mac.