I hope everyone had a great February! Mine’s been busy (the baby is beginning to crawl everywhere and pull up on everything that offers a handhold), but great! =)

A new update of The Journal 5 has been released. The big news with this release, as promised last month, is the inclusion of a German translation of the menus and UI elements, as well as a full Russian translation to replace the partial translation from last fall. Check out the News section below for more details, and check out this month Tips for how to use the new translations.

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone’s new year is off to a great start. I always find January exciting, and this one is no different. I’m working on some updates of The Journal, and I’m looking forward to working on (and finishing) some new writing projects this year.

Amateur historian Laura Donaldson is back to remind us that the future only knows what we tell it, and I have a couple new tips to share about using The Journal.

Special Note for International Users: A translation of The Journal’s menus and forms into German is almost ready, plus there is a completed version of the Russian translation. I expect to announce an update with that these translations in the next few weeks. If you would like this update earlier, feel free to email me.

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone’s 2011 is off to a great start. I’ve been keeping busy writing fiction and doing a bit of bughunting in The Journal 5.1. Which is why there is an update of The Journal 5.1 now available. =) See “The Journal News” below for more information.

Writing Prompts 3: Starting Sentences is also available. “Starting Sentences” by Mike Hommel is the latest writing prompts add-on for The Journal 5. See “The Journal News” below for more information.

Finally, in “How I Use The Journal”, Rich Hill talks about his mother’s lifelong journaling and how he is using The Journal to record his own life and transcribe the journals of his mother.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

I’m working on a minor (free) update of The Journal 5.1. So if you have any bugs you haven’t reported because you were waiting for Christmas, now is a good time to let me know. 🙂 I had hoped to have this update done before Christmas, but it might not be available until after the New Year. If I get it done before then, I’ll announce it on the email discussion list.

This month’s tips show you how to copy and paste entries from the entry tree, and how to select more than one entry to create a batch for copying, pasting, etc. Finally, I describe how I used The Journal to write my newly released young adult novel, The Girl Who Ran With Horses.

Welcome to the last week of October!

An update of The Journal 5.1 is now available. See “The Journal News” below for more information.

October means that NaNoWriMo is next month (next *week*)! If you’re participating in Nano this year, feel free to look me up. I’m “DavidRM” (as I usually am). Also, make a point to stop by The Journal’s promotional thread in the forums and tell how you use The Journal. Here’s a link:
http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/node/3713968

If you’re not familiar with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), check it out at their Web page:
http://www.nanowrimo.org

This month’s tips tell you how to repair and optimize your Journal Volume(s).

It’s autumn! (My favorite time of year.)

A new writing prompts add-on is in the works, as is a new minor update of The Journal 5.1. I expect to have more news about both of those in next month’s newsletter.

The Journal is now on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/DavidRM-Softwares-The-Journal/138124756233010

If you’re on Facebook, please drop by. And Like us. We can’t get enough
Like.

This months tips describe how to drag-and-drop entries between categories and how to get detailed information about your entries.

Welcome to August 2010!

For those of you interested in anniversaries: 10 years ago this month I sent out the first newsletter for The Journal. You can check out that first issue here:
The Journal Newsletter – August 2000

According to the “How I Use The Journal” article that I wrote back then, I had 29 total categories, 11 of those active. Today, I have 97 total categories, 61 of them active. Which seems like a lot all of a sudden.

I was pleased to see that the first Tip in that first newsletter (“Faster Daily Entry Browsing”) is still valid, even though I was writing for The Journal 2 at that time. How to change the default category font, though, is different (easier) today than it was then (click on the “Category” menu and choose “Change Default Font for …”).

In that spirit, this month’s Tip updates the old tip “Adjusting the Security Level of The Journal” for The Journal 5.

Welcome to July 2010! (Yes, I know, it’s almost August. Summer seems to be cruising along, non-stop, forcing me to catch up.)

This month history blogger Laura Donaldson gives us some pointers on how to keep a journal for future historians, and we have a tip about inserting media files in your entries.

Today, 18 June, is The Journal’s 14th birthday. In “software years”, this qualifies as “mature”, I think. Possibly even older than me. =)

The Journal has worked on every version of Windows since Windows 95, and now works on Windows 7. A lot has changed in the software world since 1996, including The Journal. And yet, quite a bit remains the same. In The Journal, there are still category tabs, and a calendar with an entry tree automatically organized for you by date, and you can still format your text (this has always been important to me) pretty much any way you like.

I tried to find an old screen shot of The Journal 1, but I seem to have misplaced them all. That’s probably just as well. It was quite ugly, in a Windows 95/Visual Basic kind of way. 😉

This month’s tips are about The Journal’s default folder paths, and how to rename a Journal Volume. Plus, we have a new set of writing prompts.

May always seems to be a busy month. Especially this year, as my parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. We threw them “a bit of a do”. Very fun, and great to see all the siblings and most of the grandkids and great-grandkids (my parents’s grandkids and great-grandkids, I mean; I have neither; so far). I hope your May has been full of family and fun, as well. =)

I also released an update of The Journal 5.1 this month. See “The Journal News” below for more information.

We have a new set of writing exercises, and in the tips section I discuss the difference between “Save Journal” and “Backup The Journal” and “Save Entry As…”