On Saturday, 3 Feb 2007, John Buono reviewed MacJournal 4.1.1 for the Macintosh. MacJournal is software and is made by Mariner Software. MacJournal is a(n) Blogging and Journalling product which "creates blogs, makes journals, and does podcasts. It is a really good journalling program with lots of extra features". John Buono gave it an overall rating of 6, Good , with a required skill level of 3, Easy To Use. (Note: All ratings on this page are based upon a seven point scale.) John Buono will use it at Home and would recommend it to friends, coworkers, and family members. John Buono had the following special comments to make about MacJournal:
I have never been big on journaling or blogging, but love podcasting. MacJournal makes putting together a podcast easy with its inclusion of an audio recording capability.
MacJournal is extremely easy to install and extremely easy to configure. MacJournal is very easy to use. The documentation is very good.
John Buono thought the top 5 points about MacJournal were:
- Multiple journals, with a default autosave at 10 minutes
- Audio recording capability
- Being able to publish your blog
- Full text editor with spell checker, and you can easily change backgrounds
- Export function
John Buono had the following special good comments to make about MacJournal:
MacJournal is fairly specialized, but what makes it so good is that it does one thing, and it does it very, very well. Just about ever feature you would want for journaling, blogging, and podcasting is elegantly combine these features into an easy to use program.
Designed like a word processor of sorts, you can make entries using the keyboard, or audio recording. You can drag and drop graphics very easily, but that is the only way you can get graphic into a page.
The documentation is well thought out, and is designed for on screen viewing.
What is a nice touch is that the export function supports just about every format that you would need to use, but not so many that you would be scratching your head asking "Why would I want to do that?"
There are so many neat, well thought out features that I could go on and on. Every menu choice, and preference you see, you think that same thing, "that is a really good idea."
John Buono noted the following 5 negative point(s) about MacJournal:
- Default save location is in library/application support/.
- Better integrated with iWeb publishing.
- Documentation has no index
- No provisions for video podcasting
- No RSS support unless you have it on your web site already
John Buono had the following special negative comments to make about MacJournal:
Understand that these are not bad things, but suggestions. I found nothing bad at all with this program, in fact I am using it more and more each day to keep notes for specific projects.
The single biggest thing that is lacking is iWeb support, and that is a major draw back as far as I am concerned. iWeb makes doing blogging and podcasting simple, and this program needs to support that. With the two together you have a complete package.
I also do not like an application saving its data to other then the documents folder. I am not sure why they are using the library/applicatons support folder, but that is just plain wrong in my book.
The pdf manual needs to have an index, but the search function that is part of Acrobat helps.
i would really like to see the support for video podcasting, but then again I don't care for blogging and am a podcaster. That feature is clearly out of what the author had in mind.
John Buono had the following overall observations to make about MacJournal:
I really like programs that are well designed, well thought out and do what they do very very well, and this program is no exception. In fact many vendors could take heed of what a good program should be. Focus on what the application does, and do it very very well with no errors.
MacJournal 4.1 is a prime example of what an application should be. The feature set supports what it does, and is not so feature ladden that you can't use it. It is fast, and comfortable to use. You can find all the features that you want to use, without having to spend hours reading the documentation.
In fact the only time I had to use the doc was to make sure that it did not support iWeb. Since I could not find that feature in the program, I wanted to make sure it was not buried someplace.
I can strongly recommend that if you want to start keeping a journal, or blogging you should take a hard look at MacJournal.
If you have any comments about this review, please contact the Webmaster for further information.
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Date Revised: 25 October 2005
