Is There Life After Journler?

SINCE reading (admittedly rather belatedly) about the demise of Journler, the best darn journaling app for the Mac there ever was (except MacJournal back when it was freeware, but that's another story that would spoil categorical statements), I've been keeping an eye out for possible alternatives. Not because Journler's sudden move into abandonware rendered it instantly useless, but simply because I'm not confident that Journler will ever be picked up by another developer, and that in turn makes me less than keen to keep plugging entries into an app that will eventually stop working, or work in a partial or glitchy way, after a future OS upgrade. At least with apps still in development, there's a better chance that they'll make the full transition to OS X 10.7, aka "Stinky Ocelot," and beyond.

One of the features of Journler that I used to enjoy was its straight-to-blog posting. This enabled me to use the app as a multipurpose personal diary, highly subdivided catch-all note-taker, and blogging client for anything that I wanted to make public. This very useful feature was removed after my first donation, and I limped along for several years afterwards by composing my blog posts in Journler, then exporting them from there as an HTML document, then viewing the source in Safari, then copying and pasting that source into the Blogger Web editor. As far as workflows go, it probably ranked somewhere near the bottom in terms of pleasure and efficiency. But Journler was near perfect in every other way — Applescriptability, aesthetics, tags, options, iLife integration, etc. — so the whole blogging rigamarole seemed like a minor inconvenience.

With Journler's obsolescence looming, the luster has left a lot of those positive attributes. And the continued inability to blog from within the app is as good a reason as any to start hunting around for a new journaling app, something to occupy the special place in my Applications folder that Journler once did. The only criteria: in-app blog posting.

First, I gave SOHO Notes a try. I tried for more than an hour to set up my blog using all the help that turned up on various Google searches. There is no FAQ on the Chronos website that addresses this particular problem, and you have to register on their support forum to either ask a question or simply view other posters' questions. It costs $40 and the interface only lets you write in an awkward "page" or "note" view. More bells and whistles than I could use in a lifetime, all of which are turned on by default, including a persistent tab-type drawer that I discovered lurking at the corner of my screen and leapt out at me when I didn't want it to. Deleted.

Then I gave MacJournal a spin. Not bad looking overall, and about as cluttered or as minimal as you want it to be, but there are still some clunky icons left over from the freeware days (as is the delightful Taco feature, it's worth noting).

Although many aspects of MacJournal's UI are customizable, I found that much of it lacked the careful polish one expects from Mac apps: spacing on the journals sidebar was too tight, the "Entries" icon in the toolbar grew more and more separated from its text as I fine-tuned my preferred icons, and the entries sidebar wasted otherwise valuable column space when situated on the top in the three-pane view. Like Journler and SOHO Notes, MacJournal offers video and voice recording, but its visual implementation is downright awful. Trying to figure out how to create and then view a video note was a litany of UI no-no's, and when the pop-out movie window finally reappeared, the Quicktime control slider was cut off due to a buggy resize. Journler's AV note paradigm (and for that matter, SOHO Notes') is much slicker, as it shows those notes as both text links and clickable note attachments, and the recording process itself is far more intuitive. For example, the pre-recording window in Journler shows your mug as your iSight sees you; MacJournal just shows a black screen. "Is this thing on?"

MacJournal's Blogger integration was very good (it downloaded all my previous posts from this blog and imported them as entries, but it didn't preserve some formatting, like blockquotes) and the edit screen offered some basic HTML options. However, the blog configuration settings are found under the "Journal" heading in the file menu rather than in the preferences. Test posts worked okay, and the ability to keep the server-side posts in sync with the client-side posts is really handy, but it looks like adding photos or video to posts will involve the extra step of using the online Blogger editor — which is what I was trying to avoid in the first place. That certainly makes its in-app blogging less stupendous.

In terms of a Journler replacement, MacJournal remains a possibility. Yet for a paid app (normally $40, but the Mariner devs are generous with frequent 25 and even 40% off promos) with a long and rich history, it doesn't measure up to many of the features that Journler offered as donationware. I wouldn't migrate gladly, I'd do so reluctantly.

This post is being composed in MarsEdit, which marks my first experience with the app. Its blog integration is excellent; my fifty most recent posts were imported, formatting intact, in an attractive, refined UI reminiscent of an RSS reader like Vienna or NetNewsWire. The amount of customization permitted is just right. I absolutely love the different-colored HTML markup in the editing window and the supplementary live preview. The only problem is, MarsEdit isn't a journaling app. It's a blogging client. And, at $30, a pricey one at that.

At the end of my first foray into Journler replacement territory, I'm not left with a great deal of hope. In fact, it threatens to divide my personal writing workflow even further by splitting my note-taking/journaling and blogging between two separate apps: Journler (still) for the former, and MarsEdit for the latter. Journler might have been left for dead with no hope of rescue in sight, but it still offers the best mix of journaling tools and design relative to all the other apps in its category. And MarsEdit might be a staid and expensive one-trick pony, but it's awfully good at what it does. Although far from ideal, for now that division beats trying to simply make do with the quirks and shortcoming of the aforementioned candidates.