viJournal is a journaling application with the ability to send journal entries to Blogger or LiveJournal blogs. Its design is interesting - it acts first an foremost as a personal journaling system, with blogging as an afterthought. This does seem to be the developer's design philosophy, as stated on his website:

"It's 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."

viJournal has an easy-to-use setup wizard, which guides you through choosing passwords, setting up the default format of your journal entries, and selecting the location in which to save your files. As mentioned earlier, blogging is an afterthought in viJournal, so there is no blog-related setup in the initial wizard.

After setting up viJournal, you are presented with a main journaling window. This window allows you to create a new journal entry, in which you can enter free-form text. There are buttons to display a pad for notes, a calendar box to browse previous journal entries, and a unique feature called a "Drop Box". This drop box lets you collect images and text for use in your journal entries, or save thoughts from your journal to be used later.

As for viJournal's blogging capabilities, these are not tightly integrated into the user interface. Before adding entries to a blog, you must set up a blogging account in the Preferences. This requires you to choose whether you are using Blogger or LiveJournal, and to enter your username, password, and blog ID for either service. Unlike some other applications, viJournal does not have the ability to connect to a service and discover what blogs are available, so you will need to find the blog ID on your own.

After blogging is set up, you select the journal entry that you wish to add to the blog, and select "Blog entry..." from the file menu. This brings up another window, in which the contents of the entry are inserted, for further editing if desired. Once ready, simply click "Send" to add the text of the entry to the blog you have selected. One minor annoyance is that this "Blog entry" window does not disappear after the entry is sent - you must click cancel to dismiss it. Another annoyance is that any graphics entered in the journal entry are not included when it is sent to the blog - only the text of the entry is sent.

In addition to Blogging entries, you can also send entries via email. Selecting "Email entry" from the File menu will bring up the user's email application, with a new message composed containing the text of their blog entry.

viJournal cannot control the overall look and feel of your blog. The APIs that it uses to communicate with your blogging server are limited to managing the entries themselves. You can, however, customize the look of individual entries by using HTML tags directly in the entry box.

viJournal provides its own online documentation in the form of Mac OS Help. Simply go to the Help menu to bring up a searchable help document. This document covers all of viJournal's features.

viJournal is a good tool for personal journal-writing, but its blogging interface is awkward at best. It appears to be designed for the more casual blogger; as mentioned before, the blogging capability seems to be mostly an afterthought.

All of the contents of this site are copyright 2004 by Peter R. Wood, unless otherwise indicated. Email me if you have any questions.