どちらも私が普段使っているフリーのメモ&スクラップソフトです。

使い分けはこんな感じ

Evernoteはプライベート用

家のMacにクライアントソフトを入れて

web上にスクラップやメモなどを保存。

Journlerは仕事用

会社のMacのローカルに、ソフトのシリアルや

メモ、webのスクラップなどを入れています。

○Journlerについて

未だに読み方が分かりません。ジャーナル？

会社にいる時間が多いのでEvernoteとどちらをよく使ってるかというと

Journlerの方でしょうか。Evernoteと比べるとマイナーなソフトですよね。

テキストとwebのスクリーンショットのjpgを保存しているぐらいですが、

動作も軽快で、検索とかも素早く出てくるので不満な箇所はありません。

メニューは英語ですが直感的に使えます。

欲を言えば、見出しも一気にみたいので縦3カラムにできると良かったです。

古いソフトなのでもう更新されないのでしょうか？

気になる箇所はその点くらいです。

○Evernoteについて

今話題のEvernote。やはりWebとの同期は魅力的ですね。

メールでもメモを投稿できるので、外出先で思いついたアイデアなどを

携帯メールで投稿したりもしています。

チェックリストなども作れるので持ち物リストなどを作ったりしています。

同期があるので当然なのですが、動作は若干引っかかりますね。

個人的には操作感としてはJournlerの方が分かりやすいので好きです。

○スクリーンキャプチャソフト

webページのスクラップはEvernoteで丸々コピーするという方法が可能ですが、

どうもページ全部を保存するのが気が思いというか、気軽に出来ないので

最近はスクリーンショットで残す様にしています。

Mac用ですが、Paparazzi!というソフトがURLからスクリーンショットを作成してくれて

とても便利なので活用しています。

これで取ったスクリーンショットをEvernoteやJournlerに入れます。

Journlerは自動でタグ（思った様にはいきませんが）を入れてくれるのでそれもGood!

webページのメモをとても気軽に取れる様になりました。

○まとめ

EvernoteやJournlerに情報をバンバン入れて行くと本当に自分の脳の他に

記憶用の「外部脳」を持った気分になりますね。

…と大変便利なこれらのソフトなのですが、問題もあります。

どちらも、項目が増えてくると自分の記憶を頼りに検索するか、

普段からマメにタグ付けしておかないと、

二度とアクセスしない情報とかも出てきそうです。

これは、ソフト云々というよりは私の脳のキャパシティーの問題ですけれど…

この記事で紹介したソフトは以下からダウンロードできます。

全てフリーソフトです。（Evernoteは有料版あり）

Evernote…メモソフト（web同期）

http://www.evernote.com/

Journler…メモソフト（ローカル）

http://journler.com/

Paparazzi!…スクリーンショット用ソフト

http://www.bridge1.com/paparazzi.html

There are some useful reviews and links for Journler on  http://www.macupdate.com

Journler blog: http://www.getsprouted.com/blog

Not being the most organised of people (an understatement!) – the chaos on my computer has finally beaten me. What can I say – I love researching online. I’ve hundreds (yep!) of weblinks, blogs, pdf’s, articles, screen shots, emails, photos and documents collected over the years but have no coherent system for organising them. And starting this business is adding to the pile bigtime!

At last I’ve found a software program that I think will help. It’s a Personal Information Manager (PIM if you want to show off) called Journler. Written specifically for the Mac, it costs just over £20 – I’ve only been using it for a couple of weeks and already order is starting to be restored. Any system requires effort to keep going, but this is so well designed – it may just save my sanity!

Recently I was offered a job for a company the write web applications, specifically a PHP framework among other things. Since I’m desperate for a job I began working my ass off, learning two programming languages from scratch (PHP and MySQL), researching tutorials and learning new technigues, as well as downloading free ebooks on the subject.
(By the way, I know this awesome site where you can download full ebooks for free. When I say ebooks, I don’t mean they give you a few chapters, they give you the whole book. And they’re popular books too. I just downloaded a book on PHP that I was going to buy from Barnes and Noble.)
Wow, I can never stay on subject. So anyway, working on this stuff had me sitting at a computer most of the time. As time went on I started to get frustrated by my lack of efficiency. Over time I saw that it took too many steps to do one thing. For example, I had a web editor called Taco HTML Editor. In order to work with more than one file you needed to have a bunch of different screens open. Now back when I was a beginner I didn’t mind because I never needed more than one or two editor windows open at once. Now I did. I also noticed that I was collecting scaps of information with nowhere to put them. I had a folder structure with notes here, pictures here, PDFs there, but when the folders got to be filled with information it was a bitch to go through and try to find one line of info or a piece of code even when I knew what folder it was in. Enter my favorite Mac apps.

I apologise Windows users, all of these except for one are for Mac. But read on because the one that is for both Mac and Windows is truly awesome…

Before I get into reviewing these apps I want to say that all of these are beautiful and powerful. Mac users are really lucky to have to many great applications that are free or nearly free. Windows users would have to pay big bucks to get the kind programs we get for free… except for one on this list. I searched the web and have personaly tried each and every one of these apps. I tried multiple applications that did the same thing so I could make sure the program I use for a particular purpose is right for me. That said, here are the programs I tried. I review multiple programs that do the same thing so you can make an informed choice.

WriteRoom: Costs Money
Do I use it: No
Review:
WriteRoom is really clever application. It reminds me of Blogo’s full screen mode but even better. Blogo’s full screen has to have some buttons because its main function is to edit blogs. WriteRoom is a straight up minimalist writing application. Its just a black screen with white text. No frills. I recommend it.

JDarkRoom: FREE
Do I use it? Yes.
Review:
JDarkRoom is a free program that does what WriteRoom does. Its for both Mac and Windows. You can really concentrate on just the writing using this program. When its running it looks like one of those old school IBMs that you had to press Y or N to do something. You know, the ones with the black screen and distinctly computer like font. The ones that had those enormous floppy disks. Funny stuff. I wrote this entire blog using JDarkRoom. As you can see, it really lets you get into the writing. There are no mouse controls except one. You save, copy, paste and do everything by using key combinations like Command+C for copy or Control+H for help. The only thing the mouse lets you do is move the cursor to a certain spot. But thats all. It doesnt select words or text. Just places a cursor where you want it. It really works like an old school IBM. I like this program a lot. Writing is so enjoyable I actually thought about writing a book using it.

Blogo: (Costs money – Demo Available)
Do I use it? : Yes. I wish I could keep it but I don’t have the money. Once my trial period is up it will be deleted.
Review:
Blogo is an awesome program. Its simple at first glance but powerful under the hood. When I first opened it I thought I was going to hate it but it grew on me. Its very graphocs oriented. You won’t find much text in the user interface unless you hover over the buttons. It does exactly what you would want a blogging application to do. It lets you write blogs, add tags and assign your post a category. You can go back and edit previous posts (which I’m doing right now) and add trackbacks and ping servers from the list of servers built in or from a list of servers you specify. Full screen mode is the feature I love most. You hit the button and you get a blue screen with a white text box in the middle. All you see it the program. Nothing else. No Apple menu, no dock, nothing but the text and some word processing buttons that blend in to the background. Thats whats cool too, the buttons. If you’re in full screen mode you don’t need to exit it in order to add a link or a photo, or to make text bold, underlined, etc. Full screen mode cuts out all distractions and lets you just write.

Ecto: Costs money – demo available
Do I use it? : It will be my main blog editor when Blogo’s trial period ends.
Review:
Ecto is a cool product too. Before I found blogo I thought it was the be all and end all of blog editors. It does everything blogo does but its focus isn’t really on the writing itself like Blogo. Ecto encourages you to add photos and other media to your blog. It has a flickr plug-in built right in so you can add photos from your flickr account to your blog. There are other plug-ins but I haven’t tried them out yet.

Bleezer: FREE!
Do I use it? Not anymore. Before I got a hold of a free copy of ecto Bleezer was my fave.
Review:
Bleezer is a great blogging tool and its free. It does what the other two do and it does it well. Before I got a free copy of ecto and before I got my Blogo demo, this was what I had settled on. There are only two things I don’t like about this program. First, for some reason it wasn’t able to fetch my list of categories for posts so I had to leave my posts without a category. The other thing was its icon. It has this clipart looking typewriter icon. I know it has nothing to do with the functionality but I keep a link to my blogging app in my dock for easy access and I don’t want an ugly icon in there. But if you don’t want to spend money on blogging software by all means get Bleezer. It works just as well as the other two.

Qumana: FREE!
Do I use it? Hell NO!
Review:
This thing sucks. First it took forever to load. This program things its photoshop or something with its splash screen and its listing of components to load. A blog editor should not be as big as Photoshop nor should it take as long to load. Then it wouldn’t connect to my wordpress account. Then it decided not to startup. It sucks. But I should expect that from a program written in Java. Java programs, unless they are small and simple, suck. They may run smoothly at first but after five minutes they start sucking up system memory like a system memory junkie. Limewire does this sort of thing. Thats why I switched to Acquisition.

Limewire: FREE!
Do I use it: No way!
Review:
I’m sure everyone has used Limewire by now. Its an old program. I’ll keep this short. It starts sucking up memory thus slowing down your computer if left running for more than five minutes. There are better alternatives, especially for Mac users.

Xtorrent: FREE and Pay Versions available
Do I use it: No
Review:
Xtorrent is a torrent downloading program based on Transmission (I’m pretty sure). It adds search functionality right in program so you don’t have to use an online torrent tracker like Pirate Bay. The problem is that since its connected to the Gnutella network (I think… I know it connects to the same network as Limewire) there’s nothing but music and video files. No one on the Gnutella network is sharing torrents, they’re just sharing files directly using P2P. So you end up having to go to an online torrent site if you want anything other than music and video. Thats why I dropped it. Of course it does just fine as a torrent program but the extra funtionality is for nothing. I just use Transmission – its a lighter faster program that does the same thing.

Acquisition: FREE and Pay Versions available
Do I use it? Yes
Review:
Acquisition is my replacement for Limewire. Its fast and doesn’t use up all my system memory. Its also a great looking program. The user interface couldn’t be outdone by Apple itself. It was created by the same guy who made Xtorrent so it has some of the same features. If you’re looking to download music or movies/photos then this is your Limewire alternative. Forget Xtorrent. I use this for my music and movies and Transmission for my torrents. You’re probably saying “why not just use Xtorrent for both?”. Because I’m usually looking for files other than music. So I use Transmission because it is light and allows me to use some heavy duty programs while it sits in the background and downloads. If I were to use Xtorrent I would be keeping a program thats more likely to use more memory thus leading to less efficiency.

FrostWire: FREE
Do I use it? FUCK NO!
Review:
This is an exact replica of Limewire. All they did was change the name, color, and some icons. And worst of all, it manages to be even more of a memory hog and much much slower than Limewire. Fuck whoever came up with this one.

InvisibliX: FREE!
Do I use it? Yes I do
Review:
Small useful little utility that hides/shows hidden files or folders. This is really useful if you’re developing software or doing any highly technical stuff. It removes the need to type in the folder path in the Apple Menu’s “Go to folder…” option. I usually have to edit hidden files when I’m programming and its really annoying to have to open Onyx (a great program for customizing your Mac with hidden features) and then enter my password and then tell it I don’t want to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of my hard drive then press cancel on the little popup that tells me I should verify my system permissions then click the “Paramters” button, wait for the loading bar to reach 100% then enter the ‘Finder’ tab and finally click on “Show hidden files and folder”. If it took you long to read that imagine how long it takes to actually do it.

BBEdit: Costs Money
Do I use it? Most of the time so far.
Review:
I fortunate enough to come across a free verion (and no, I didn’t “steal” it) of BBEdit and I love it. Now that I’m doing some more advanced web programming this app has become extremely useful. The great thing about it is its Projects and Groups. When you save a project it saves all the files you work with together. When you create a group you name it and add all the files that belong to the group. Then they all show up in the sidebar together. Its better than having tabs. All the files I need are listed neatly in the sidebar. No more flipping through open editor windows trying to find the file I want to edit anymore. I can have as many open files as I want with one window open. Its light and fast. Just the way I want my programs.

Coda: Costs Money
Do I use it? Yes
Review:
I haven’t used this program much so far but from what I see its more powerful than BBEdit. It has a beautiful user interface with a sidebar listing the files and folder in your main web site folder beside the main editing window. It has a leg up on BBedit in that it allows you to access the terminal from within the program. It also makes it easy to access files on a remote server in order to edit them. It doesn’t have the groups like BBEdit but if all your files are within your site or program’s main folder, which they usually are, you should have no trouble accessing those files. It also supports tabs. Oh, and I forgot it has a live preview option. You can preview what your site will look like in Safari without having to open it. Coda uses Safari’s webkit engine to display your site exactly how Safari would display it.

Safari 4:
Do I use it? Constantly
Review:
I love Safari 4. The general public can’t get the new version until January if they release it on time. Since I’m a member of Apple’s development community over at Apple.com I was able to pick up a copy. Part of the terms of being a member is that I’m not allowed to say anything about it. So this is all I’ll say: Its fast. It has no bugs so far. The new features are subtle. Only a few. But there isn’t much to improve about Safari anyway. Since I can’t get into detail (they could sue me) all I’ll say is that I recommend it. Safari 3 is available now. Get it and by the time version 4 comes you’ll be hooked. Windows users – Safari is available for you too. Try it out, I’m sure you’ll love it. This is not the app that has a windows version I was talking about earlier… that one comes later…

Shift: FREE
Do I use it? Yes
Review:
Shift is a program that connects to your MySQL database. It allows you to manage your database, tables and all, using an interface instead of coding by hand. I currently don’t have databases on a web server. I have Apache running MySQL and PHP 5 running on my Mac. Thats what I’ve been using as a server environment. It can connect to your database even if its on your own machine. I used to use PHPMyAdmin then I used YourSQL which worked just as well as Shift but Shift has a prettier interface. When in doubt I always go with the better looking program.

Yojimbo: Costs money
Do I use it? Not anymore
Review:
Yojimbo is a personal information manager. What’s that? It stores all sorts of scraps and random information. Yojimbo boasts that it lets you organize your information the way you want but after having tried other software like it I know thats not true. I had Yojimbo for a while and liked it until I found other PIM apps could do far more. Its not a bad program. It just didn’t fit me. This is why I switched to another PIM: The icon. Haha, again a superficial reason. But I want my personal info manager to be my digital Moleskine. A big red circle (think: Japanese flag) with a sillouhette of a guy karate kicking in front of it doesn’t encourage me to treat it as if it were a Moleskine. It boxed me into holding only certain types of information. Yojimbo holds notes, bookmarks, web archives (copies of web sites to be read offline), photos, passwords, and serial numbers. I want it to hold pdfs too. It doesn’t allow you to create your own folders to group information the way you would like to. The categories I just listed are the only ones you will ever have. Yojimbo doesn’t offer any text editing capabilities. If you write a note it will always be black text on a white background and it will always be in Arial size 12. I want to be able to make text big or small, red or green or blue or whatever, and have any font I desire. Thats why I switched after finding others that do a better job.

Journler: FREE! for now…
Do I use it? Not anymore
Review:
Journler is really cool. It does what Yojimbo does but it lets you organize your way. You can create category folders to keep certain types of scraps in. And best of all its FREE!!! But not for long. In January it will costs $30 or something. You can get Journler 2.5.x right now for free but as soon as 2.6 comes along early next year you will have to pay. So get it now before its gone… or read on to learn of an even better program.

Mori and Notae: Both Cost money
Do I use them? Not anymore
Review:
Both Notae and Mori are beautiful applications that do what Yojimbo and Journler do. They are PIMs. Both of these programs have pretty much the same features. You can group notes and store any type of file in them, etc. The big difference I found is in how the organization looks. Let me explain. In Mori the folders you create sit on the left side of the screen. The look like a folder tree. Each folder having a little triangle next to it that when you click all the folders within it drop down like a tree branch. I personally didn’t like the way that looked but I thought Mori had a prettier user interface so I rate it higher than Notae (when in doubt…). Notae on the other hand, displays its folders like iTunes but slightly different. You know how in iTunes you have the columns for Artist, Song, Album, etc. that you can scroll through. Well Notae’s folder view looks like that. Your main folders sit in the first column to the left and when you click a folder it displays any folders it has within it in a column to its right. If you can picture how iTunes does it I’m sure you get how this works. I liked the way Notae displayed its folders but not the overall look of the program. One selling point for Notae is that its program icon is two Moleskines stacked on one another.

Now for the program you’ve all been waiting for. The mother of all Personal Information Managers. Its the rare kind of program that is for both Mac and Windows. Its…

Evernote: FREE!
Do I use it? I wouldn’t use anything else
Review:
There is so much to say about evernote. It does what all the PIMs listed above to and more. It truly is my digital Moleskine. I can create notebooks, which are basically folders, and create saved searches. So say I wanted to search for all my scaps that are tagged with or contain a password I would first search for them then save the search. Once the search is saved I now have a smart folder that will add scraps to itself automatically based on what terms I was searching for. Evernote comes with a free web service that allows you to access any information online or from your cell phone. It can handle any file you throw at it. Music, movies, pictures, web pages. It even lets you take a screen shot of the current web page in your browser for later use. This could be helpful for a lot of things. For me I could take a screen shot of a programming tutorial online. This is how I use mine. So far I have two notebooks in Evernote. The first one I created so that I could load everything I used to have in Yjimbo and the other PIMs by importing the information. So right now that notebook is a mess. But even if your notebook is a mess you tag entries when you enter them. So if you have tons of information all you need to do is type what you’re looking for in the search bar and it comes up instantly. This works like magic especially if you are consistent with your tagging. Since Evernote can be used as part of their web service (you can use just the application and not the web service if you like. But why note both? Its free and very useful) you can allow your notebook’s contents to be shared publicly with others online or privately just for you or you can create a notebook that doesn’t sync up with the site at all. I didn’t explain syncing have I? Well if you have a free account you are allowed to store 40MB of information on their web site so you can access it from anywhere. You can get more storage if you become a premium member. What I do is I have a notebook that isn’t synced online. It contains things like large files that I wouldn’t need anywhere else and passwords and serial numbers. My other notebook is private but is also synced online. So far I’ve used 15MB of my 40MB monthly limit. If you happen to reach the monthly limit, no worries. You can still store an unlimited amount of info in your program on the computer and just wait until next month. Or if there’s something you really need to get online just move some files into a non synced notebook to make space. I must stress that this program is free, has no limitations, does not require you to join their service, and you can keep your files as public or private as you want. You can encrypt any text or file you want and it will show up like those dots where you enter your passwords online. To see the text just enter your password. There is really a million ways you can use this program and its service to organize your digital life. This is actually a program that I would pay for and not only do I get a program but a free online service that lets me access my “digital Moleskine” from anywhere. Windows user, ever wanted to know what it feels like to have awesome software? This is your chance. Evernote is free.

And this is important. So important it needed its own paragraph. There is one benefit to signing up for the free online service. If there is any text in a picture you store, when Evernotes syncs it will read and catalog any writing in the photos you store. When its done syncing you can search for the words contained in a photo and it will highlight them. So say you’re out somewhere and you get a phone number. You can write it down, take a picture of it with your phone, send it to Evernote using their phone (you can set up your phone to do that) then when you get to your computer you search for… lets say you wrote the words “Phone number on the sheet of paper you took a picture of… you search for “phone number” and that picture will come up and the words “phone number” will be highlighted. Amazing. I just got it yesterday but I’m already working it hard. I have it organized so that I can get to my passwords, song lyrics, blog ideas, books, tutorials, etc. with just one click. If you collect a lot of junk and scraps of info from online and you have no place to put it or no way of easily wading through the jungle of files and folders you’ve created in an attempt to get organized easily, Evernote is for you.

Toast Titanium: Expensive
Do I use it? Yes
Review:
I just got this program today. It saddens me to say that I have outgrown iLife. iDVD doesn’t allow me to burn downloaded movies and the movies I can burn have a time limit of 90 minutes. Unless I’m burning a Disney film that sucks. So I got toast. And I love it. I have an iMac G5 thats about four years old and it burned Interview with the Vampire in about 3 hours. Thats fast considering the fact that my computer is a little old, I had to convert the movie from .avi to DVD format, and burn it at 2X speed. My dad’s newer computer running Windows XP has a DVD+/-R drive and software specifically for it and it wouldn’t burn the movie because of some stupid error. I never get errors like that on my Mac. But anyway, Toast Titanium is a great program. I thought it would eat away at my RAM but surprisingly it didn’t. Don’t go and open Photoshop while you’re converting or burning but you can do simple things like surfing the web, email, or blogging like I’m doing.

If you’re an organization nerd like I am, check out the Google Group I started called “Digital/Analog”. I’m the only member but hey, groups don’t just have 100 members over night.

I’ve been collecting my ethnographic data for about 10 weeks now.  I have to admit that I’m a bit behind… I have not looked at and analyzed every post on every blog I’m observing since the date I started observations.  Conveniently for me, those posts generally don’t disappear.

Part of the delay has been developing a workflow.  Because posts sometimes DO disappear, and so that I can do work if I happen to be offline (rare, but it has been known to happen), I am archiving the text of each blog post.  Straight up copy/paste doesn’t work – it doesn’t capture images or links.  Just viewing the source of the page doesn’t work – because it just gives you the framework of the page, not the post html itself.

My first tactic was to use the source viewer tab extension for Firefox and copy & paste from there into a local html file, which worked but I generally lost some formatting and getting it from there into my info management system – Journler* – was a multi-step process.  

And then, about two weeks ago, a very smart person on the Journler support boards reminded me that I could drag a URL straight from my browser onto the Journler icon on the dock to create a shortcut to the post (which will open in Journler’s built-in browser) from which I can also easily create a reasonable local text copy.

Obviously this is a MUCH better workflow, but it means I need to go back and re-do a bunch of stuff.

Could I have figured this out sooner?  Probably… but it’s not the end of the world and everything looks oh-so pretty and is oh-so easy to find & code now.

*It should be noted that I ADORE Journler.  I use it for EVERYTHING – task management, receipts, webpages I need to read, anytime I need to dump any kind of text that I need to find again later.  Highly recommended – but you have to be a person of superior intellect Mac user.

There are many different applications that may or may not be suitable fpr taking down your notes. Here, I will present a few, which I use myself, and yes, I do really use more than one of those apps since there are many different scenarios, in which I need to take notes.

Evernote
Evernote is a simple but really powerful application for note taking of any kind. Like any of these apps, it can be used to take notes in a text editor and to save them automatically. But, there is more to it. you can create screenshot notes, copy and paste notes via its menu bar item (a new note will be automatically created), and even create a kind of snapshot note, which will be taken via a webcam. You can tag you notes, and you can search via these tags or full text search.
But, the true power of Evernote lies in its web features. You can create an online account, which you sync your notes to. When synced, full text search can even be used on notes, which are screenshots or photos. To make this possible, Evernote applies a text recognition system to the imagefile on their servers, and after the next sync, its results are made available offline.
The Evernote desktop app comes to you for free, and even the online service is free, if you can manage with 40 megs of upload limit a month. If you need more, you need to pay a monthly fee. Versions of the desktop applications are available for Mac and Windows, and there are also clients for different mobile phones.

Scrivener
This comes as the perfect app for the writer of long texts using a mac. It is Literature and Lattes application for writing anything longer than one page of text. But, its not only a writing application, but lets you manage your research for a larger writing project as well, and  very efficiently as well. You can even add photos and pdfs to your research folder and have them always available in your research folder. If you are writing a longer text like a novel, or a scientific paper, you can use Scrivener to have your research notes stored in the same place and available in the same place as your actual writing project.
Scrivener can be bought for 39.95$ here, a 30 day trial version is also available. It is only available for the Apple Mac, no Windows version is planned. Highly recommended.

Journler
This is my place for taking down notes, that don’t go in any of those other apps. Its kind of a personal Wiki, where I can organize all my different shorter writing Projects. For instance, this blog entry was drafted in Journler. It can even be used as a simple GTD app, though I prefer Chandler for this. But it has all the tools needed for this, and is very easy to use. If you need a program to take notes of any kind in one place on your Mac, just use this. It lets you organize your notes in intelligent folders, insert photos, audio files and videos into your notes, and apply tags and full text search on them on the fly. It is a very powerful app, and if it wasn’t for the online features, Evernote would have to go. Journler is free for non-commercial use and available here only for the Mac.

Chandler
This is my GTD app, which I already introduced a few days ago, see here for my original blog entry. It is a great open source GTD and calendaring application, which even has great online features for free. It is available for Windows, Linux and Mac here. Very Highly recommended.

Well, quite a lot of useful apps for anyone to take notes. Feel free to comment, if you find any replacements, additions to these apps, which I might find interesting.

“There is a legend in Eastern countries that when a person first becomes conscious of his true nature as a child of God, they make a pilgrimage still further eastward until they find a green spot, in which, under the grateful shade of trees, they may lie down and, in their mind, see a vision of the City of Peace. Such a spot is our Green Acre – A place where beside still waters one may realize the peace that passeth all understanding – the peace which the world can never give nor take away. This is the Place: the Idea is too great to be put into words – it must be felt. Those to whom it has become a living reality can be numbered in the thousands… It has been our privilege to stand with open door, calling to all who hunger and thirst for the abundant life to come and be assured that it is possible to find it now.”

Sarah J. Farmer 1899

PatchBurn
Parche para que el sistema reconozca grabadoras externas
http://www.patchburn.de/

Adobe Lightroom
va a la caza del Aperture
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

Google SketchUp
http://sketchup.google.com/download.html

Temperature Monitor
Software par monitorizar la temperatura de trabajo de la CPU y unidades de disco de tu Mac, en los modelos que incorporan sensores de temperatura.
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html

Temperature Monitor Widget Edition
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TemperatureMonitorWE.html

Renamer4Mac
Utilidad para renombrar varios archivos a la vez siguiendo un patrón común
http://www.power4mac.com/renamer/

OnyX
Software para mantenimiento, optimización y personalización del sistema.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/download.html

Adobe Flash Player
Visualizador de archivos Flash en tus navegadores: Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera y AOL
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

LiquidCD
Aplicación para grabar CD y DVD
http://www.maconnect.ch/index.php?page=liquidcd&lang=fr

CoverFlow
Catálogo visual de aquellos discos que tenemos en la librería de iTunes
http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/

iStat pro
Widget de monitorización del sistema
http://www.islayer.net/index.php?op=item&id=7

Journler
http://journler.phildow.net/

httpmail plugin
http://www.automagic-software.com/downloads.php

Xbench
Utilidad para hacer Benchmarks del ordenador (medida estandarizada del rendimiento)
http://xbench.com/

Gdisk
Utilidad para usar tu cuenta de Gmail como Disco virtual
http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/

Okay, so I have the attention span of a goldfish.  

After having an issue with a plug-in for Firefox (couldn’t completely uninstall it, and the un-delete-able folder it left behind would have driven me insane), I’ve scrapped it and gone back to Safari – simple, sleek and speedy.  Why go anywhere else?

So now it’s me, Scrivener and Journler.

I’ve been running dropbox on my home laptop and work desktop for a few days now. It seems to be working amazingly well. Very user friendly, very quick. I have moved my data folder for Things (a GTD application) to the dropbox folder and after pointing the application to where its data had moved to it has worked flawlessly. My home and work machines are perfectly in sync. Now there are many other sync options but this one has the advantage of not having to remember to do anything, ever. The application at home and work are always in sync. I do not have to remember to press “sync” or close an application or anything. Remembering to sync before going home has be the cause of the failure at all previous sync strategies using a variety of sync software. Dropbox syncs continuously though in realtime.

I have also synchronised my Journler application. It has worked flawlessly again, even though I have the application open on 2 machines simultaneously (although I am only modifying one at a time obviously).

Papers has not been so smooth. I still need to investigate whether it is syncing properly or whether I am just imagining that some things are not updated. It could be that the application doesn’t write some data until it is quit, that would certainly cause problems I guess. More experimentation required.

I have also moved my folder of perl scripts to the dropbox folder. Not only does this sync between home and work but includes a versioning protocol. So if I modify a file I can go back and examine previous versions of that file and revert to one if I have messed things up. I know that svn etc do something similar but this has been idiot proof and has not required all the messing around to install that subversion seems to take.

Parsers is a graphical user interface for text parsing operations. Developed by the same guy as produced the excellent Journler software is is likely to progress well. Although much of the functionality is usually accomplished by scripting and langages like perl manage this very well that approach isn’t for everyone. The GUI is nice and the functionality looks good. The application is described like this

Parses is “drag and drop text parsing and data mining”. The app is designed to help you preprocesses data so that you’re left with only the information you need in a format you can easily apply elswhere. In a visual environment you create and test re-usable, rules based documents for parsing well formatted text.

For example, let’s say you want to download your local weather information from an online feed. The temperature, conditions and forecast change by the hour but the html in which that information is contained otherwise stays the same. That is, the relevant information or variables change but the format remains constant. Parsers helps you extract the temperature, conditions and forecast from the feed so that you can use the information elsewhere, in a widget, your own webpage or a spreadsheet for example.

I haven’t had much chance to play with it yet, but it looks interesting for small repetitive tasks.

First, let’s get Evernote’s business out now: I have updated my recent review to reflect its new beta 1.1 version.

Now, let’s take a look at Together.  If you remember my comparative review of web information collection applications, you know I liked a lot Together.  Now that it’s been significantly upgraded in its new incarnation stamped Version 2.1, let’s see how our landscape of options evolved in the context of the comparative review.

• Overall, with a global average score of 2.8, Together is more than ever a solid competitor to all the other 8 applications I’ve tested. Prior to its version 2.1, it only scored 2.4.  On many aspects, Together is now much more usable and mature.
• Together’s interaction with you when you collect items has been revamped.  From 15, its score for Collection – Interaction bumped to 23, making Together part of the top 3 applications on that aspect.  This improvement was achieved by adding an option to ask you to file and tag each new item as soon as you collect it (using the shelf, with a really great and natural-feeling workflow!), adding much welcome bookmarklets in your browsers, and allowing you to set up a global keyboard shortcut.
• Together also became more consistent in its collected items vital assets.  Its score for Collection – Consistency is now 9, from a previous 7.  That’s because annotating a web page collected now no more makes you loose its link.  Previously, after annotating a web archive, you couldn’t find anymore where it was collected on the web (apart using google)!  Together’s new score also means that it shares the second place with EagleFiler, although both lag behind Evernote (which scored 16).
• Together’s search features also made a big jump forward, leaping from 25 to 40, joining Journler and Evernote in the front line.  That’s the best score yet, although if I updated my benchmark, Evernote (>35) would lead clearly.  In any case, a score of 40 means leading-edge overall search capabilities.
  • Again, I know we could argue on DevonThink’s specific search capabilities which I have probably undervalued, but here I’m speaking of the overall search features.  DevonThink, with its score of 20, was one of the poorest contenders overall and although some specifics of its search features are exceedingly great, you might nonetheless be disappointed by the rest.

While running Together through my benchmark of tests, I felt a few rough edges that made it feel more like a beta version than a gold release.  These rough edges (which I can’t remember because I didn’t write them down) weren’t crashes or anything serious, though; they were more like small glitches with the ways the interface has been updated.  Nothing here serious enough for me to advise you to wait for the patch releases.

Well, that’s it.  Together has now taken its place in the leading pack of web information collection applications.  On top of that, you could add that it makes a great file collection application, and you’d get a really serious competitor on that front to EagleFiler (and some other apps).  All of this having been said, I want to congratulate Reinvented Software for such progress on such a great application.

Update (2008-05): The beta version was updated to 1.1, bringing support for PDF documents and some other minor goodies.  I’ve updated this post accordingly.  It also reflects the updated scores of Together 2.1.

-

In March, I was able to snag myself a TechCrunch invitation to try the upcoming Mac version of Evernote.  When I first discovered it in 2004 (for Windows), I soon became an advocate of Evernote for its organizational capabilities.  Evernote wasn’t perfect, but it was already a leader in the market and since then, it’s kept progressing at a steady pace.  Now that it’s starting to breathe on OS X, it’s time for a new testing round.

Today, I took a few hours to run Evernote against my web information collection test benchmark.  I’m now ready to share with you how Evernote, in its actual pre-release form, competes with the pack.

As this is pre-release software, please understand that Evernote will probably fare even better than now when it’ll reach Release Day.  Until then, here’s what I found.

Before jumping in the results, I feel the need to remind you two things:

Now, to the results:

All in all, Evernote for Mac brings incredible competition into the domain of web information collection applications.  I see myself using Evernote over anything else for this purpose soon, although I will probably continue using some of its competitors for other specific needs.  Writing in Scrivener is something Evernote won’t compete with, for example.  Moreover, since the application itself will be free, Evernote will bring quite a new challenge to some of its general-purpose competitors.  Evernote will change the face of the market as we know it today.  I hope it will be both for the best interest of itself and its competitors; if it is, then we’ll also benefit greatly from that as a result.

Der Software-Entwickler von Journler wird seine Software ab Version 2.6, die demnächst erscheinen soll, nicht mehr als Donationware, sonder für den Preis von 34,95 Dollar anbieten. Scheinbar spenden auf freiwilliger Basis zu wenig Leute.

Update 3 (2008-05): I reviewed Evernote’s and Together’s recent updates.  While reading this post with its slightly outdated results chart, remember to use the one that’s besides this paragraph to get the updated results.

Update 2 (2008-03): Evernote is the new wolf that’s coming in the pack, and it already redefines most of what’s best.  Read this review to know how.

Update 1 (2008-03): EagleFiler’s new version 1.3 makes it fare much better.  Read this review to know what changes regarding the following comparative review, as I haven’t updated this post in any other way than this mention.
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Although computers are great to work with information, in the last 10 years using a Windows PC, I never found any software solution that would work well for my information collecting and management needs, although OneNote and EverNote came close to it.  But now that I use a Mac, I wanted to see if I’d be able to find something really great.

Our Problem

I believe what makes it hard to find the good application for our needs is that we all have our own very personal ways of dealing with the information that comes before our eyes every day; but most importantly, I believe we still haven’t seen our software in general become mature. Software still behaves like a baby who won’t share his toys. Software will grow someday, but Software just isn’t there yet. Say, Software, what will you do when you’ll have grown up?

Our Need

Until Software becomes an adult, there’s many applications available, and some of them might solve most of our information collecting needs. How would we define the best proposition?

I believe what we need in any application is that it:

• supports the features needed,
• interacts comfortably with us, and
• keeps doing the previous two criteria in a consistent manner.

This definition is most probably critical in the case of information collection software. When I speak of consistency for information collection purposes, I mean, for example, that whatever the web browser I use and the method I use to collect something, it will always produce the same kind of rich text entry, accompanied by its link.

The Contenders

Now, since this is all about reviewing different applications to see which one of them is closing the most towards maturity, here’s what I tested:

• DEVONthink Personal 1.9.12
• EagleFiler 1.2.7
• Journler 2.5.4b15
• Circus Ponies NoteBook 2.1.262
• Scrivener 1.11
• SOHO Notes 6.5.3
• Together 2.0.4.967
• Yojimbo 1.5.62

I also tried VoodooPad, but I felt it wasn’t really designed for information collection purposes.

The Tests

I wanted to do a thorough test to see how much each one of these applications has to offer on what I believe are the most important features and interactions, so I reviewed the features each one proposes and put most of them in a spreadsheet.

Then, I went through each one of these features, trying them in each application, to see how they compared to the crowd and even sometimes to what I believe might be better still.

Finally, I gave them scores based on a 5-star scale.

The Results

Here’s the summary of my tests.

The first thing you need to know is that I’m not going to draw all the conclusions that can easily be drawn when you look at this big table. We would loose time writing and reading what can be so easily be seen in the table. I’ve highlighted some results to show who leads the pack, who follows the leaders, and finally, who miserably crawls behind everyone else. Also, I would have liked the table to be better designed, but what you see is what I could do in the amount of time I had.

As you might remark:

• I didn’t test some features you might find exceedingly important, like, say, printing support, file importing support, and exporting to different file formats. I almost never print; I no more dream of the ideal application to manage all my files; and I could feel some guilt for not evaluating the rest, but I’m confident you’ll be able to find your answers by your own means while still deriving some value out of my tests.
• I tested more thoroughly the collection features than the rest. Their results are broken down under the three criteria I defined previously.
• Conversely, I evaluated the rest of the features without breaking down their scores, because I believe they didn’t need that much digging.
• Some features, which I found exceedingly useful, like, say, wiki or split editor, tend to improve the score of only one application. I hope you’re as okay with that as I am.
• You might be surprised that your favorite application performs better than you thought on some criteria. It’s probably because I dug deeper than you in its preference settings or in its interface. I wanted to evaluate it to its full potential.
• On the opposite, you might find that I overlooked some possibilities. I proof-tested almost everything, but errors happen all the time. Feel free to tell me about it.

The Details

Now, you might sometimes wonder why I rated something the way I did it. If you really want to find the answer and you don’t find it in the sections I wrote to detail each application, you will need to have a look at the following table that contains my notes along the ratings. I suggest you open it in a new window and keep switching between this page and the table to understand it, using the following key, ordered left to right then down:

• (i): Inconsistent in its behavior; will be rated down in the Consistency section, not in the current section
• WA: Web Archive
• Ways: The number of different ways you can do something
• FP: Full Page
• Running: Only while the application is already running
• (N)R: For (not) running, means that it works even when the application isn’t running
• Windw Area: A little dedicated window
• Predefined: There’s no preference setting to change it
• Indirect: You need to click somewhere before doing it
• Not 100%: Almost 100%!
• Until annotated: Works until you annotate the collected element
• Tabs as bookmarks: You create bookmarks so you can see tabs
• Suggests: Suggests completions of what you started to type
• DragFmHUD: Drag from the HUD window
• List: An alphabetically-sorted list
• Intersection: The ability to see what is tagged with all the selected tabs. If intersections aren’t supported, selecting some tags will yield you all collected elements that are tagged with at least anyone of the selected tags, which is almost useless
• Converted WA: Before you can do it, it needs to be converted to another format (usually RTF)
• WA extractions: You can’t anotate the WA or anything inside it, but you can copy/paste something out of it and into the enclosing entry, that you will then be able to annotate
• Use underline: Because there’s no standard yellow highlighter
• C WA: Converted WA
• Obtrusively: A dialog pops up and you’ll need to dismiss it soon or late
• Virtual Folders: You may file something in multiple different folders
• Folders: You may file something in one and only one folder
• Where are copies?: When something is filed in more than one virtual folder, you don’t know about it
• Tag:name1 tag:nam2: You need to type this kind of query to see tag intersections
• Create your SC: Smart Collection
• Inheritance: Well, let’s say it’s an advanced feature that you might want to read the help file about if you’re no programmer
• 2%: Constant CPU usage observed
• Database fragile?: I read that some people have lost their entire database just after a system crash, which would be really bad
• Really bad reports: I saw many people on different web sites telling how the company wasn’t taking seriously their clients by releasing broken software and taking months to fix it

My Reviews

DEVONthink Personal

DEVONthink is very capable in some areas where all the other applications would bite the dust. It features an automatic Wiki system, assists you in classifying the information you collect, and probably best of all, it allows you to browse your entire database in incredible ways by giving you an index that sums up all your collected entries and by providing you with a very potent see also feature. If you need that kind of stuff, look no further.

Otherwise, you might get put off by its dinosaur-looking interface and lack of a great system to organize your information so you can quickly dig and filter through it your own way.

Oh, and don’t forget to install its bookmarklet in all the browsers you use so you can collect those full-page web archives quickly and easily.

These remarks having been said, I believe DEVONthink might have a very bright future… starting at version 2.0. Competitors, watch and learn from DEVON now, or get buried later!

EagleFiler

EagleFiler was a bit of a good surprise to me.

Probably because of its name and its marketing, I was very reluctant to even consider testing it. But as I disciplined myself to at least read its whole web page describing it, my interest was sparked, and not for nothing.

EagleFiler is simply, out of the box with no customization, the best package if you’re constantly in need of collecting full-page web archives out of many different browsers. You can do so in much quicker ways than all the other applications (except DEVONthink, if you install its bookmarklet in all your browsers). And it features one of the best tags support.

At the same time, it’s not so great if you consider how crippled it is from sharing features and small, but useful, navigational features like, say, browser-like back and forward buttons.

Let me tell you I seriously considered making it my tool of choice.

Journler

Although targeting journaling or blogging needs, Journler is a really serious and capable contender regarding our discussed needs.

Its overal value is really great and it really outperforms most of the competition when it’s time to integrate with iLife, to search through your library, to make sure you won’t search too much in the future when you’ll need to find the same kind of information, and to share something with a friend or the community.

Some of the things that keep it from being near perfect is that it’s really not so great at the tags game and at keeping links to what you grabbed on the web. Don’t forget to experiment a lot with its preference settings, as it might dramatically change the quality of your experience with Journler.

All in all, I believe this application is the most serious contender for your hard drive space and daily use, although it’s much more of a jack-of-all-trades that lacks some essential skills that feel too important for some people to live without them. In the future, I believe Journler will learn from its errors and become incredibly hard to ignore.

NoteBook

I often wondered if I should remove NoteBook from this evaluation. I thought I would go to the end with its testing, because it’s presented as a contender to this category on its web site. Well, I now believe I shouldn’t have bothered too much with it, although I must tell you it’s not without having any value or not being interesting at all.

Let’s just say that I believe it’s not good to use for that kind of information collecting needs. I like to think it’s targeted towards some other kind of collecting needs that I haven’t evaluated at all here and that it might just be a really superior contender on that front.

Scrivener

Scrivener was a hell of a surprise.

Since there’s a writer somewhere within me, I’ve been watching this application from afar for some time now, but the thought of evaluating it here with the other applications never crossed my mind until I had narrowed my own decision to three applications and browsed their respective web sites one more time. One of them mentioned Scrivener as a competitor, so I religiously went on to read its web page again, just to eliminate it right off. And then, what happened for Scrivener is the same that happened for EagleFiler. I was impressed and decided to give it a whirl. Like EagleFiler, it seemed good at this, on top of being good at that. And man, oh man, what a whirl it was! You’ll find out why later.

For now, let me praise its ability to play well with tags, its split editor, its full screen mode and, more precisely, its feature that allows you to see and/or edit many entries at the same time, as if they were only one file (with visual indicators that let you know what you’re doing).

It’s not that great at collecting information, but if you’re willing to forgive its little lack of flexibility on that regard, it will do as great as most other contenders. Oh, and forget about 1-click access to sharing something, too.

All of this having been said, let me tell you Scrivener is definitely underpriced, if you consider how much innovation and quality it incorporates.

SOHO Notes

I really didn’t want to loose time testing SOHO Notes, but I did it for the sake of exhaustivity. I wanted to know if it innovates in some way that would benefit to the other applications.

Why am I so hard on SOHO Notes? Because I’ve read too much bad comments about it. How this company’s products in general would be released with plenty of serious bugs and wouldn’t work well until several months after that. How email enquiries wouldn’t at all trigger replies or would trigger them after unusually long delays and with unsatisfactory answers. How people decided to migrate to this or that. How people were telling everyone that this application isn’t even worth considering. So yes, I confess I’ve been influenced by all these comments. I think I have never seen that much bad comments about something I would have considered trying for my own use.

If you still want to know, it’s really flexible when time comes to collecting information, and it’s great at sharing it later on.

But, it’s not that great at organizing the information you collected.

In any case, the version I tested worked well, despite one crash. To be fair, I wouldn’t discriminate anyone who chooses it over the others.

Together

I fell in love with Together as soon as I saw it. It sports the most polished interface. Although Journler kept scoring higher for my needs than Together, I kept planning on journeying together with this lovely application.

Notwithstanding its wonderful interface, Together offers some really strong propositions. On top of all of them is its ability to collect selections of web pages as web archives, while all the other applications can only collect full-page web archives. It’s also the closest to offer consistency in the collection process, regarding the links every application should keep when it collects something out of the web. And don’t forget that it’s better than most competitors at dealing with tags.

Now, while some aspects of Together are really polished, it doesn’t mean it’s perfect. For example, it lacks some browser-like back and forward buttons. Also, like most of the contenders, easy sharing isn’t part of the program.

I really wonder how much quality the developer is going to continue putting in this application. It’s gonna rock!

Yojimbo

Yojimbo looks like another jack-of-all-trades.

It’s great at collecting information in general, although it doesn’t stand out on any particular side.

Other than that, don’t forget to consider its interface’s lacks of navigational features and the fact it’s not so great at organizing, searching and sharing your information.

And that’s it. Yojimbo simply doesn’t stand out of the pack, and although it’s a great product with just a few missing features, that won’t hinder some people’s love for it because they don’t need what it lacks.

My Choice(s)

You might wonder which application I chose over all the others. I wrote all of this using Scrivener, and that’s my answer. Although my choice is made, I plan on using Scrivener’s trial period instead of rushing with my credit card as I would do in the past. I made some errors I still regret today when I think about them.

Scrivener has so much for itself and it’s a great feeling to use an application that excels at writing while it’s also really great as an information collector.

Again, I believe it’s better to use an application that excels at something useful while being great at the rest, than using another one that is great overall but doesn’t bring anything new to the crowd. And on that regard, I would also really have liked to have DEVONthink as a serious alternative because of its advanced text analysis features, but it wasn’t there for me.

Next, my choice would have been Together or Journler, although EagleFiler wasn’t far behind.

Your Mileage May Vary

In fact, your mileage will vary. I’m telling you that because even mine does!

The results I showed you are what I would call generic, although I’m far from believing they are completely exhaustive or 100% objective. So they are generic to the extent of what I wanted to test and how I evaluated it. Now, if I wanted to tailor them precisely to what’s really important to me, here’s what I’d obtain:

• Journler: 3
• Scrivener: 2.9
• Together: 2.6
• SOHO Notes: 2.6 but lacks two things essential to me
• EagleFiler: 2.4 but lacks one…
• DEVONthink: 2.4 but lacks three…
• Yojimbo: 2.2 but lacks one…
• NoteBook: 2.0 but lacks four…

The order almost doesn’t change, but Scrivener closes nearer to Journler, and Together goes ahead of SOHO Notes.

So it may mean, on one hand, that I did a really good generic evaluation or, on the other hand, that what I thought of as a generic evaluation is already so much targeted towards my own needs that it’s not worth calling generic at all. I believe the second hand is the one that’s right, since I didn’t include some features like printing support and such and such…

So if you want your own results, you will need to ponderate my evaluations according to your own needs and add your evaluation of the things that are missing. That’s a first way how your mileage will vary.

One important thing to note is that only the top three applications are viable options for me, and that’s a second way how your mileage will vary.

What Developers Need to Do

To improve the primary value of their offers, I believe developers should concentrate on:

• Making sure that under all circumstances (consistency), anything grabbed from the web comes in only one rich format and carries its link (support). If it’s not possible due to OS integration problems, try making a good set of bookmarklets or some other potent tool, and encourage your users to only use this solution because it will work the same great way for them in every possible context.
• Providing quality support of organization features like tags and annotations. I believe these features should feel in your applications like they’re first class citizens of their ecosystem. Concerning tags, my experience tells me they’re much more important than if they’d only be some temporary hype.
• Developing an exceedingly rich experience towards some precise verticals, like Scrivener does for writers.

On a more general note, keep up the good work!

What I Learned

Through doing all this testing and measuring, I grasped a better understanding of a few things:

• It’s hard to integrate software into an operating system. None of the applications managed to do it on some specific aspects.
• It’s exceedingly hard to properly ponderate the value of each thing that we test so that it yields the correct impact on the global results. Consequently, anyone writing or reading a review should give much more importance to the details than to a global score. It’s so easy to mess up a global score and so easy to overlook something important. (That’s why I gave you so much details and I didn’t even try to ponderate anything for you.)
• Software is much more personal than I thought. It’s another reason why global scores can’t mean much to somebody unless they’re precisely tailored to his needs.

Antes de mais, quero agradecer. Qual não é o meu espanto e felicidade quanto reparo que temos, não um, mas dois comentários nos últimos posts! E como tenho quase a certeza que a minha mãe ainda não decorou o nome do blog, fico mesmo orgulhoso! Então, para provar que estou mesmo tocado, decidi fazer um post acerca de ter recebido comentário nos anteriores! Estou a brincar, isso era a facada no que resta de dignidade neste blog.

Neste blog é suposto falar-se um bocado de assuntos relacionados com a Apple, o que não tem sido feito, e eu não tenho conseguido viver com as dores de consciência, por isso cá vai, review de aplicação, quentinha!

E a aplicação escolhida foi: Journler.

Journler é um processador de texto, muito simples e muito poderoso também. Posso dizer que o utilizo praticamente todos os dias, para tomar notas em aulas, notas pessoais e para escrever aqui para o blog. Para começar é visualmente decente, é bom não ter de usar um programa feio, é fácil de usar e tem integração com iLife, Mail, Adress Book, etc! Podem contar com um programa rápido, com uma pesquisa eficiente, e com uma boa organização. Os textos são organizados por categorias, tags, folders ou smart folders, por data, e ainda dispomos de um calendário (isto é só extras)
O que se pode pensar antes de utilizar um editor de texto sem ser o Word, Bloco de Notas, Text Edit ou por aí é “E compatibilidades?” O journler contorna esse ponto muito bem, tem uma prática opção de exportar os textos para os formatos mais conhecidos (Word Document, Rich Text, PDF ou Plain Text), por isso assunto arrumado.
O ponto não tão positivo (para não dizer negativo…ok, tenho uma simpatia pelo Journler, que é que querem? acho que é pelo ícone, com o caderno tão sóbrio…) é quando precisamos de passar os dados para outro disco. Para este caso o processo de gravação e recuperação dos dados não é lá muito bem explicado e só com umas tentativas é que fui lá!

Melhor de tudo: é grátis! Apetecia-me esfregar isto na cara da Rita Blanco e do outro actor que faz a publicidade do Pingo Doce, ai isso é barato? Isto é grátis! Então eles tão fartos de descontinhos, de talões, de promoções, e eu tou a arrancar cabelos de os ouvir dizer que tão fartos, sempre com a mesma entoação e convicção! “Basta! Pum! Basta!”? O vosso basta seria sincero se ouvissem umas quantas vezes seguidas o anúncio. Aposto que nem vão ao Pingo Doces aqueles falsos….

Ah já agora, para lerem mais sobre o Journler e fazerem download, o site é este.

Carbono

Some people did not like the agèd nature of MacJournal during the original match. So now, considering that MacJournal has just released a new version and Journler will soon be going commercial, I figured I would do a “fairer” match-up.

Interface

I must say, kudos to Mariner for the improvements in the MacJournal interface. It is starting to look like a nice, Leopard-worthy app. However, one thing I simply do not get is the fact that some of those godawful toolbar icons from v2 are still hanging around. I mean, they have a new dock icon, I don’t think it would kill them to get some new toolbar icons as well. Those hideous, Panther-y icons are what’s really killing this interface. I’m not crazy about the fullscreen here (but I’m not really big on fullscreen writing anyway) but it is quite customizable. The option to display entries either in the sidebar or above the actual entry text (like you would see messages in Mail) is nice. The calender looks a bit odd swimming in a see of white space when one’s sidebar is extra wide but otherwise it looks a-okay. One thing I do not like is that while in three-pane view, the entry list does not have an alternating background. The entry selection buttons (on the far left of the toolbar) are a little odd because they go up and down rather than left/right. Although this makes more sense I still think it looks a little odd (however, the plastic finish on the buttons is nice).

The Journler interface recieved a pretty small facelift with the latest update. The main change is that I noticed is slightly more spacing in the entry list. Overall, the Journler interface is quite similar to that of MacJournal. I prefer the calender in Journler and I obviously prefer Journler’s toolbar icons. Magically, Journler finds out what your system folder icons and uses them in its sidebar. I also like the more integrated header in Journler because it is both easier to fill out and, in my opinion, looks better.

MacJournal: 7/10 – This would be a really solid interface if Mariner would just redo those buttons!

Journler: 8/10 – A nice, consistent interface that could use a couple tweaks.

Features

I’m not sure if journals in MacJournal are supposed to act like folders, but I’m not feeling it. Although journals can be placed inside each other, I really don’t like how the hierarchy works. Bad folder structure aside, MacJournal has all the features I would expect. It has wiki-linking, labels, fullscreen and blogging as well as sound and video recording.

Journler has finally brought real tags, a feature I have been waiting for for a while. Journler has all the features of MacJournal except blogging support which was recently dropped because the developer decided it was an underdeveloped feature. However, I do feel that the fullscreen (which includes all three panes rather than just the text) isn’t as strong as the fullscreen in MacJournal.

MacJournal: 7/10 – Bad folder hierarchy aside, a very nice set of features.

Journler: 7/10 – Good features but no blogging and fullscreen is lacking.

Overall

Journler is ahead by just a little bit and because it will be selling for ten dollars less, I think it’s the better choice.

MacJournal ($34.95): 14/20 – Needs more polishing, but it’s a good app at the core.

Journler ($24.95 as of v2.6): 15/20 – A good journaling application that needs a bit of work in some areas.

Look here for more screenshots from this edition of Software Sumo.