The Journal

I use a lot of different software. Lots. I know I am not alone. This isn’t braggadocious1, I’m just setting up background.

I’m not writing about the ones that are “just there” — anti-virus, online storage sync programs, and the rest that just sit in the system tray and are actively ignored.
I mean the ones I use: open them, type something, click something, search for something.

There’s about a dozen that I use daily or at least weekly. There are the ones I have in case I need them, but don’t use them very often until I do. I may have several different programs that do something similar. At one point, I had four different file/folder comparison tools on my work computer, three of those paid licenses, because each did at least ONE thing I absolutely needed to do my job faster.

I have licenses for many more — if there is a freemium version and said software is remotely competing with something in my normal toolbox, I may have a license. If you sell me software, don’t get complacent. When I  researched e-signature software for a customer’s solution, I tried a few (paid) that did not pan out. I had narrowed down small business accounting software earlier this year to about half-dozen choices before I gave them all a spin. I usually know what I need and will kick the tires until I find the ones that will take me where I need to go.

That’s a long setup, but if you discount Microsoft Office2 and the operating system, I think there are only two software packages that have consistently had on my computer for nearly fifteen years.

The Journal by DavidRM Software is one of them.

As the name says, I downloaded it to capture writing. But it is so much more.
It is the typing paper, the loose leaf notebooks, the daily calendars, the file folders, and the filing cabinets that hold all of those words.
Pages can be linked by topic, by category, or by hyperlink.

It is the tool I use to track computer problems and how I tracked all the places I visited when housing hunting in 2005. It is my daily sticky notes and my quick-capture ideas.

It is indispensable and typically the first thing I install on a new computer.

The software is one man’s labor of love. He writes the spec, writes the code, answers (promptly!) support emails. And he delivers fantastic software that I just can’t imagine being without.

Oh, and don’t tell David, but the software is ridiculously cheap. I first purchased version 3. Version 8 was released earlier this year. I somehow skipped a version long enough to get the next version when it came out for free, so that’s only four upgrades that I had to pay for. But the upgrades keep coming – at least four upgrades per year, usually more.
That works out to paying on average less in a year than I pay for other software per month.

If you write or journal or want to get organized, I can not recommend it enough.
Check it out. I don’t think you will be disappointed.

The link is here, in case you missed the big one earlier.


1. That word turned out to be short digression when it came up as unfound in the dictionary.

2. Even if I ignore those years I gave it up completely and really tried get OpenOffice and/or LibreOffice to conform to the way I work.

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