April 27, 2006
MacJournal 4 First Impressions
I’ve just upgraded to MacJournal 4 and am just using it now for the first time to write this blog entry.
I previously reviewed MacJournal 3 several months almost a year ago, and was impressed with it. I even registered it. I am, however, a fickle software user and stopped using it. I’d since changed to using Ecto to edit and post to the many blogs. The upgrade was inexpensive, only $15, so I thought I’d give it another go.
Here are a few things that I’ve discovered through writing to several different blogs using desktop blogging software as well as the web-based interfaces.
1. It turns out that I just don’t mind very much writing blog entries in the MovableType or WordPress browser interface, though I don’t use their advanced forms. They don’t work well in Safari.
2. Even when I write in a desktop interface and publish to a blog, I generally have to go in and edit it through the web interface to clean something up. For example, MacJournal 3 required that I edit the title. This results in my entries getting out of sync.
3. I tend to write in html, and not using the desktop’s text formatting features. With Ecto, I’d end up with lots of extra html codes in the entry. I guess it doesn’t matter, but it offends my need to have clean html.
So here I find myself trying again to embrace a desktop application.
I am editing right now in the full-screen mode (see image below), which I do like very much. It’s very clean, and even inspirational to type in big green font on a black background. Like I’ve stepped out of my computer into one of those fake operating systems that you see on television, like Alias or 24. You know, when the person at the computer is typing like crazy and accomplishing things that just cannot be done by typing into a console like a madman, like repositioning a satellite or cracking a 1024-bit encrypted password.
Back to the subject. So far so good. This time around just feels good. Here’s the list of new features in 4.0. Most notable to me is the blog support overhaul…
- New Inspector for manipulating attributes of entries and journals
- All-new blogging architecture
- New per-item attributes
• background color
• label
• sorting
• entry template
• editable
• blog server
- Browser-like tabs for quickly switching between entries
- Audio recording
- Links, smileys, and words are recognized as you type now (not just when you save), including a live word count field.
- AppleScript support
- Improved Full Screen mode
- Improved searching
- Improved keywords configuration
You can read the MacJournal Developer’s Blog here.
Update: Adding that the test was successful. The entire blog entry that you just read was written painlessly in MacJournal 4, and posted to the blog without incident (which was not the case with MacJournal 3).
I’m going to stick with MacJournal 4 for now to write my blogs going forward, here and on Revenews.
I do admit that I am making this edit directly into wordpress. It doesn’t appear at first glance that I can synchronize changes between MacJournal and my blogs. Will need to look into that further.
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