MacJournal: Not For Bloggers

Mariner Software is one of the few Mac software development companies I really like.Their StoryMill product is easily the best novel management and writing software I have seen and I’ve been using it for some time on a work I’ve been tinkering with.

However, their MacJournal application is not one I’ve ever been able to understand. It has traditionally been a Journaling application, one that lets you keep a diary of sorts of your daily life. While that is a neat idea, I’ve often wondered how useful such an application is because few people seem to want to run to a computer to record their lives events.

Though the app is slick, letting you organize your life into journals, folders and more, I really didn’t see how this application would fit into my life or the life of anyone I know.

However, when Mariner announced its recent update to the application, I learned that it provides another tool, blogging. Though the blogging tool is far from new, when I learned that it was capable of helping me edit my sites, I was excited about the possibilities.

It truly had the potential to go from an offline journal editor for those with no lives, to a full fledged life organizer for bloggers with no lives.

But my excitement was short-lived. After downloading the app and giving it a test drive, I learned that this was no blog editor, but rather, was a journaling application with the blog editor shoehorned in. The result was that MacJournal remains a decent journaling app, but fails to fill my much-needed niche.

Not For Blogs

The problem with MacJournal and blogs is pretty straightforward. MacJournal is a journaling app. It is designed for a strange form of life scrapbooking where you bring together text, images and video in a post about an event.

While it is a potentially neat idea for those that have the time to record all of this, when you’re dealing with something that is just for you, formatting is not terribly important. One doesn’t care if the headline is bold, instead of an “H2″ tag or whether your image is aligned left or right with proper wraparound.

However, when you post something to the Web, formatting becomes critical. Everything has to look and feel right in addition to being written well. If your header tags or alignment is off, your post can be ruined.

This is why many bloggers code their posts in raw HTML rather than giving a visual editor, even the default one in their backend, a chance to mess up the code.

However, MacJournal has no such feature. In fact, in my time using it, there were no formatting features at all. The only text formatting one can do, other than adding images and video, is bolding, italicizing or colorizing text. With no ability to hand-edit raw HTML code, that means that even a simple post like this would be completely impossible.

But the problems did not end there. There were no ways to edit the most meta information. You could not change the post date, permalink, excerpt, draft status or anything else related to the post. Though MacJournal offers tags, none of my old posts, once imported in, bore their existing tags. It is unclear if new tags are treated as such in WordPress, MovableType, etc.

The result is that, unless your posts are a few paragraphs of text with an image or video nearby, MacJournal is going to disappoint you when it comes to blogging. It’s a pity though, there really is a great deal to like about the application.

Some Compelling Features

The reason that this review is so difficult for me is that I actually want to like this application. It has a slew of interesting and compelling features that, if I could use the app, would make it a virtual must-have.

Here’s a short list of my favorites:

• Full Screen Editing: Admittedly, I think that the full-screen editor craze that has people shelling out $25 for Writeroom is overrated I found the full screen editor in MacJournal strangely compelling. It worked well, was easy to read and great to work with, I could see writing an initial draft in that mode and then formatting in another. I might not pay full price for a standalone editor, but if it were included as part of another app, who knows?
• Organization: MacJournal could, theoretically, become a central hub for all of my daily activities. By helping me create blog posts, keep track of links/ideas and manage everything I do with my writing, it could be a powerful boost to my workflow, eliminating sticky notes for good.
• Smart Image Hosting: Finally, I like how MacJournal allows you a variety of sources for hosting your images, including Picasa, something even Skitch doesn’t provide.

All of these features could, in theory, give the application a serious advantage over my current Blog editor, MarsEdit. However, at this time, MacJournal is just too weak in the blog department and will need some serious beefing up before it is ready for even a modest blogger.

Conclusions

I really want to like MacJournal. Much like my ex-girlfriends I really want this to be love but have to admit that it has no real function in my life, it just isn’t a good fit. It’s better for me to kick it to the curb and give it a chance to grow up, assumedly after sleeping with all of my friends, and see if maybe we can work something out as adults.

The good news is that the MacJournal team has hinted at the possibility of adding many of the features I need into a new release down the road. However, it does little to help me right now as the countdown timer is ticking on my free trial.

Sadly, this is an app I will not be purchasing. Though it has gotten some great reviews from major publications, for this blogger, it doesn’t have a place right now.

That being said, I highly recommend MarsEdit to any of my power blogging friends. I think you’ll find it very helpful and a great time-saver.

At least until MacJournal gets up to code.