Journler ($24.95 as of v2.6): 15/20 – A good journaling application that needs a bit of work in some areas. MacJournal ($34.95): 14/20 – Needs more polishing, but it’s a good app at the core. Journler is ahead by just a little bit and because it will be selling for ten dollars less, I think it’s the better choice. Journler: 7/10 – Good features but no blogging and fullscreen is lacking. MacJournal: 7/10 – Bad folder hierarchy aside, a very nice set of features. However, I do feel that the fullscreen (which includes all three panes rather than just the text) isn’t as strong as the fullscreen in MacJournal. Journler has all the features of MacJournal except blogging support which was recently dropped because the developer decided it was an underdeveloped feature. Journler has finally brought real tags, a feature I have been waiting for for a while. It has wiki-linking, labels, fullscreen and blogging as well as sound and video recording. Bad folder structure aside, MacJournal has all the features I would expect. Although journals can be placed inside each other, I really don’t like how the hierarchy works. I’m not sure if journals in MacJournal are supposed to act like folders, but I’m not feeling it. Journler: 8/10 – A nice, consistent interface that could use a couple tweaks. MacJournal: 7/10 – This would be a really solid interface if Mariner would just redo those buttons! I also like the more integrated header in Journler because it is both easier to fill out and, in my opinion, looks better. Magically, Journler finds out what your system folder icons and uses them in its sidebar. I prefer the calender in Journler and I obviously prefer Journler’s toolbar icons. Overall, the Journler interface is quite similar to that of MacJournal. The main change is that I noticed is slightly more spacing in the entry list. The Journler interface recieved a pretty small facelift with the latest update. Although this makes more sense I still think it looks a little odd (however, the plastic finish on the buttons is nice). The entry selection buttons (on the far left of the toolbar) are a little odd because they go up and down rather than left/right. One thing I do not like is that while in three-pane view, the entry list does not have an alternating background. The calender looks a bit odd swimming in a see of white space when one’s sidebar is extra wide but otherwise it looks a-okay. The option to display entries either in the sidebar or above the actual entry text (like you would see messages in Mail) is nice. I’m not crazy about the fullscreen here (but I’m not really big on fullscreen writing anyway) but it is quite customizable. Those hideous, Panther-y icons are what’s really killing this interface. I mean, they have a new dock icon, I don’t think it would kill them to get some new toolbar icons as well. However, one thing I simply do not get is the fact that some of those godawful toolbar icons from v2 are still hanging around. It is starting to look like a nice, Leopard-worthy app. I must say, kudos to Mariner for the improvements in the MacJournal interface. So now, considering that MacJournal has just released a new version and Journler will soon be going commercial, I figured I would do a “fairer” match-up. Some people did not like the agèd nature of MacJournal during the original match.
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