Re: The Journal 4.0

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2328

Posted by 100341.2151
2004-12-07 02:14:49

Steve -

I’ve been on the lookout for journal software, too, and have been surprised by the comparative lack of good programs. Maybe EverNote could be used for journalling purposes.

I think the Journal 3 is a neat little program (I haven’t looked at v4), although pricey at $40. What puzzles me, though, is the absence of combined journalling/(auto)biography programs. Given the popularity of genealogy, you would think that people would be getting interested in documenting their own (or other people’s) lives as a basis for developing fuller accounts of them for future family historians.

Since most people don’t keep a journal consistently over the long-term, such a program would need to combine a conventional journal program with some means of documenting critical life events after the fact for those periods that are not covered by existing journal entries.

The only program I know that goes some way to doing this is The Life Journal - http://www.lifejournal.com/ . This is a rather too “New Age-y” therapy-centered program (although many of these aspects can be turned off or just not used: daily “pulse-graphs”, etc). But it allows one to record critical events as dated journal entries, and then to view them as “nodes” on a series of graphical time-lines, and as lists of such events.

This provides a very useful way of helping to sort out - for example - how one spent the 1980s. Since I have a memory like a sieve, this provides a useful way of building up - via checkbook stubs, credit card statements, and sparse journal entries - just what on earth I was doing then.

Like The Journal, the Life Journal has also recently moved to a rather clunkier (IMO) new v2, and costs $40. If anybody knows another program with similar capabilities, I’d like to know about it. Genealogical programs like The Master Genealogist - http://www.whollygenes.com/ - can produce chronological lists of events in individual lives, but are not really designed for mapping single lives, and don’t have any graphical component.

I’m afraid this is all rather off-thread, but perhaps Life Journal’s timeline feature and its ability to categorise topics brings it just within the boundary.

Derek

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