MacJournal, by Mariner Software, is a highly comprehensive journalling and blogging software compatible with — you guessed it — Macs (sorry, Windows users!). I’d heard good things about it, and wondered how it might work as a Dream Journal. So I decided to give it a try and put it through it’s paces.
The Basics
With MacJournal, you create any number of Journals, whether stand-alone or nested inside each other like file folders. Each Journal contains entries, which can consist of text, images, audio, PDFs, and other files. Setting up a new journal is very simple — just right-click on the dialog bar or choose File, New Journal. Once created the Journal can be moved inside an existing journal by dragging and dropping.
Creating Journals/Entries. To create a new entry, click on “New Entry” in the toolbar or choose “New Entry” from the File menu, or drag files from the Mac Finder window either into the open window or the sidebar to import them in their entirety. Dates are automatically encoded into the entry, and show up in a calendar at the bottom of the sidebar. In the example below, I’ve created a new Journal entitled Dreams, and sub-journals to catalog dreams by year. I dragged the text from my word processing software, and then dragged an image from my desktop to create my first dream entry. Formatting the text was easy using the "Fonts" and "Colors" icons, as was resizing the image, which I accomplished by dragging the corners of the image, although images can also be resized using a menu. MacJournal also has a feature called the Media Browser which lets you select the type of media you are looking for and drag it easily into the journal entry.As you can see by the illustration, deleting a journal or an entry would be equally easy — just a matter of highlighting the entry or journal and clicking the big "Delete" button in the toolbar.
Importing entries. If you’re like me, you probably have many years of dreams recorded on your computer in either simple text documents or formatted in Word or Excel and the thought of transferring all those dreams to a new software application is not a happy one. With MacJournal, you can import text into an entry, or an entire document into a journal. Below is a sample of a dream I imported directly from Word into MacJournal. As you can see, it preserved all my original formatting AND, best yet, it’s completely editable.
Even more impressive and exciting for those of you who have LOTS of dreams to move over, is MacJournal’s "Import Droplet" feature. You can create a droplet in a particular location (such as a folder containing your dreams) and drag all the dreams into it. Presto! They are all individually imported into your journal.
Organizing your Entries. In addition to viewing your journal entries by date and name, you can also organize them by topic, rating, and tags which you create yourself. For those familiar with blogging, tags are words that help to identify the content of an entry. Journals can be sorted by any of these flags through using sorting arrows on the display, or a menu option.
Searchability. You’ll have noticed from the above illustrations, that MacJournal toolbar has a "Search" box, allowing you to search any of your dreams by word, phrase, title, or whatever else takes your fancy. Put in the search term, and the results, by entry title, display in a window. Clicking on any entry shows the highlighted search terms. This is really handy when you are trying to find all your dreams featuring cats, for instance. There is also something called Smart Journals, which allows you to save frequently used search terms.
Exporting. One thing I tend to worry about with recording my dream journals on a computer is, if I’m using a software program, what happens if I no longer want to use that program, or I want to have copies of my journal? With MacJournal, that worry is solved. You can easily export an entry or your entire journal (including individual entries) into a variety of formats including text, RTF, Word, HTML, PDF, podcasts, and iPod notes.
The Extras
- Audio and Video: If you have access to a microphone and/or a video recorder you can easily record and add audio or video to your journal entries. Dream theme music anyone? You can even use an entry which has audio to create your own podcast.
- Customization and Templates. With MacJournal, you can customize the appearance of your document from its background to various types of text, and you can create templates which can speed up your data entry through creation of forms, checkboxes, and lists of attributes which would be common to every entry. For example, I might want to set up a form for recording my dreams which had the following fields: "Title", "Date", "Symbols", "Dream Number".
- Tables and Lists. You’re not limited to simple text entries with MacJournal. You can also add tables and lists with ease. This comes in handy when you want to separate out symbols for example, with interpretations, or if you want to list attributes beneath a particular topic.
- Blogging and Sharing. One of the interesting features of MacJournal is its ability to create blog posts from your journal entries and easily move them to your blogging platform. Using a step-by-step interactive format, MacJournal can detect your blog and walk you through setting it up with your user name and password so that posts can be uploaded easily (or you can set it up manually). Some of the blogging platforms supported include Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, and MoveableType but you can also configure your hosted blog. You can even schedule when your entries will post using MacJournal’s calendar and post multiple entries at one time. Pretty nifty.
If you don’t have a blog, you can use MacJournal to post your entries to your Apple iWeb website, or to MobileMe in order to share your thoughts with friends, family, or the world at large. If you don’t want to do any of those things, you can also email an entry right from MacJournal. - Quick Note: you can set shortcuts to enable you to quickly add entries to your journal from any application without having to switch back to MacJournal.
- Picasa and YouTube. Yikes! With MacJournal, you can easily post photos from Picasa to your blog, or embed videos from YouTube into journal entries.
- Keeping it Private. It’s your journal and if you don’t want anyone else seeing it, you can encrypt (lock) it by creating a password and password hint.
- Statistics. Here’s a cool feature. You can select a journal or an entry, and view the "statistics" on it. A box appears showing you words and characters, total words, average words per entry, and word frequencies. The word frequencies tool is a quick and easy way to see what types of symbols or concepts are showing up in your dreams. In the illustration below, for example, I can see that "Computer" has appeared three times in my journal.
- Linkability. Guess what? you can create hyperlinks within your journal entries! Say you’ve done some research on a dream symbol, and found a great article online. Using the Linking tool, you can link directly to that URL right from the journal.
- Syncing. You can sync your journal with MobileMe and Palm devices.
Conclusion — Highly Recommended
Well, I’m sold. MacJournal is not only extremely easy to use, sophisticated, and feature rich, but enables me to feel secure in knowing that I can backup or export all my journals in another format so they won’t be lost. I was also impressed with the ability to easily import all my existing dreams into the application without losing structure or content. I also especially like the ability to have all my dreams recorded in one place, where I can easily search, compare, edit, and enhance them with images, sound, or hyperlinks to relevant material online. Having each dream in a separate Word file just doesn’t quite measure up 
And, while I’m not especially inclined towards posting my dreams in a blog, if I were, MacJournal would make it a piece of cake.
With the holidays coming up, why not pick up one for yourself, as well as other dreamers on your list? At $39.95, it’s a super deal. Find out more at Mariner Software Website
Tags: dream journaling, MacJournal
