The Journal 5 Released
The Journal 5 (The Project formerly known as Vee) is now available.
My plan for The Journal 5, which began development in September 2007, could be summed up as “The Journal Even Better”. I wanted to improve all the major parts of The Journal–the database, the internal data structures, the user interface–and provide more support for international users. Plus I wanted to offer additional category and entry options, more reports and other tools, and, finally, to offer a selection of “skins” for the user interface.
I think I achieved most of that–even if it took a bit longer than I expected (18 man months; didn’t see that coming).
In short, The Journal 5 is an inside-out redesign of The Journal, preserving all the great journaling and writing features that have accumulated over the years and adding some cool new features and capabilities.
What’s New in The Journal 5?
Updated user interface:
- Choose your favorite “skin” from the many, many available (170+).
- Quickly switch between logged in users and open Journal Volumes with their (optional) tabs.
Updated Journal Volumes:
- No more 2 GB limit. 128 GB is the new limit for a Journal Volume.
- Have as many Journal Volumes as you want, all open at the same time.
- Be more secure with the improved backup and restore features, with options to copy your backup file to separate locations automatically.
More category options:
- You can have categories that create new entries for you every century, decade, year, month, week, day, and hour.
- See a month or a year at a time with the new month and year calendar views.
- Use the day planner to see your reminders for today or the next week.
- Automatically “stamp” your entries with current date and time.
- Edit your entries with WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) formatting.
More entry options:
- Your calendar category entries can have loose-leaf sub-entry “attachments”.
- Drag and drop entries between categories with ease.
- Select multiple entries and copy (or cut) them to the Windows clipboard–then paste those entries into another category of The Journal or even into a word processor like MS Word.
- Insert media files (audio & video) into your entries, and play them back within The Journal.
- Take advantage of the new (optional) grammar checking features to automatically change i to I and automatically capitalize the first word of a sentence.
- Use topics to mark blocks of text within an entry, or to tag an entire entry.
- Be even more organized with topics that have sub-topics (that have sub-topics, that have sub-topics…).
More search options:
- Automatically include sub-topics when searching by topics.
- Search for multiple topics with either AND (all) or OR (any) logic.
- Search in reminder notes.
- Limit your search to whole words.
And more:
- Export your categories and entries to HTML and get a Web-page-like list of categories and entries.
- Create a wiki-like set of entries with automatically updated links.
- Run a report of those entries that you’ve created or updated in the last week, month, year or other date range.
- Post to Blogger (Google) without getting an annoying error message (and lots of other minor fixes and changes).
I’ll be writing a post mortem of Project Vee/The Journal 5 in the near future.
-David
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