although i never really abandoned it, i have recently moved back to macjournal after working with devonthink for half a year. the new version macjournal 5 has some of the same features as devonthink, and is much cheaper and leaner. this is useful for me since i work exclusively on pre-intel macs with tiger and i have only 1gb of ram in my ibook. devonthink demands oodles of ram. hopefully macjournal 5 won’t prove equally demanding!
when the fabled devonthink 2 is released, if ever, i might have another go with it, but i think it is a little too ambitious for its own good, at least in the pro version which you have to use if you want to have more than one database. macjournal now also allows multiple database, (which it calls ‘documents’). this is great if you don’t need to access all of your data all of the time. mj5 also introduces smart folders (or journals) and status, flagging, tagging, priority and rating options for each entry. most importantly it allows you to import any sort of file and view or launch it from within mj. you can also open and edit a file or entry in a separate window and have different windows open at any one time. there is also a liveword count.
under the hood things are also much improved : you can just double click on one of your macjournal data files to open it, and the single huge unwieldy database is a thing of the past. unless they are encoded, files are just saved as rtf or rtfd and can be accessed externally from the macjournal application. without a doubt this would also improve .mac synching which was so horrible in macjournal 4. as i finally gave up on my .mac account at the beginning of the year i have no way of testing this but i will report on my tests using a webdav server and ben rister’s synk in an update to this post later, if anyone is interested.
of course being able to post directly to your blog as i am doing with this post, and downloading and editing all your existing posts from within mj is one of the crucial features which makes this software so useful. last but not least, the personalized support provided by the developer dan schimpf is also brilliant.
wishlist : although i haven’t got one (yet!) obviously iphone syncing is a must. also it would be nice to be able to link to journals and entries in different documents and have mj open them if necessary and to be able to change the status labels. smarter smart journals? a ‘today’ smart journal? tumblr support? (is coming dan says)
but it’s good to be back!