viJournal is designed as an analogue of the good old-fashioned page-a-day bound diary - the kind you buy in a stationer's. You write your entries under dated headers and save them collectively by month and year.

Your life here

viJournal's got tons of features for power-journalers, whilst being friendly, clean and easy for all daily diarists to use.

In fact, it has more features than you can shake a stick at (unless it's a very big stick and you're prepared for some serious shaking). Let's look at a few of them.

One day at a time

Like in a real journal, each viJournal entry represents one day. What, only one entry per day? Actually, it's better than that. Way better. There's lots of flexibility built in which lets you organise your journal the way you want it. For a start, you can have as many journals as you want. Have one journal for your personal diary, another as a research log, another for blogging... the possibilities are endless.

If you'd prefer to have all those categories within one journal, you can use sessions. Sessions let you break up your daily entries into separate sub-entries, which can be accessed handily via Safari-style tabs.

viJournal also provides you with a handy note pad, tucked away in a drawer. You get a new note with each day's entry, and you can choose to carry over the previous day's note when creating a new entry. Useful for making running to-do lists, for example.

Finding your way around

You can navigate your entries in a variety of ways. Most people like to use the entry browser, which gives you a list of all the entries in your journal. For those who like widgety controls, there's a calendar.

viJournal remembers which entries you've looked at recently. You can step back through recently viewed entries just as you would step through visited pages in your web browser.

Finally, there are local hyperlinks. You can add http and file hyperlinks to your entry text. You can also link to other journal entries. Hyperlinks are colour-coded, so you can see at a glance which type is which.

Words, pictures and music

Pictures can be included in your journal entries in two ways. Either drop them directly into the text, or for a more organised approach, drop them in viJournal's daily thumbnail gallery. You get a new gallery for each day. All you have to do to see the full-size images is roll the mouse over the thumbnails.

If there's a piece of music you'd like to remember, associated with a particular time, you can insert clickable iTunes markers. Just choose the currently playing track, or drag and drop tracks from iTunes to create a marker. Later, when you want to remember what you were listening to when you wrote that entry, just click the marker, and iTunes will play that track.

Keeping in sync

Say you use viJournal on your desktop Mac at home, but you also like to write your journal on the road or at work, using your laptop. You can keep them both synchronized with viJournal's built-in Journal Syncing. All you need is a FireWire or network connection.

But I don't like brushed metal!

Okay, so some of you have perverted tastes. Don't worry, we've catered for you. viJournal has an Aqua option.

What else do you get?

So, those are some of the key features. We haven't covered any of them in much detail, and we haven't even mentioned in-text checkboxes or entry export or emailing entries or the Drop Box (which lets you store images, files and text clippings). Then there's search-and-replace (with regular expression support for smart guys), backup and restore and autosave. There's a full-screen editing mode, so you can compose your entries without distractions. And finally (insert fanfare) there's blogging.

If viJournal doesn't have everything you're looking for in a journal application, and you would like to request a feature, click here for guidelines.

System Requirements

The current version of viJournal, which is a Universal Binary, requires Mac OS X 10.4.4 or later.

If you're running Mac OS X 10.3.9, you can use viJournal 1.7.6, which is PPC-only. Both versions can be obtained from the downloads page.