rare pattern in a world of tech, design, Drupal & such

MacJournalYojimbo

MacJournal gets all kinds of raves from the various software reviewing sites, but I have to wonder why.

The raves were enough to get me to overlook the very "web 1.0" style of Mariner Software's website. The MobileMe sync feature was enough to get me to pony up $34.95 instead of going for Journler, which is cheaper now and has a very nice feature set itself. I wanted this app to serve as my new business journaling software. The sync ability is important to me because I often do my best thinking at home, away from the daily hubbub at the office.

Once installed, MacJournal worked fine.

But then I tried to sync it across two computers. Every time the MobileMe sync ran, it wanted to delete several entries.

Right now, after a series of updates, my MacJournal journal has been whittled back down to the first entry I made. Good thing I had saved the rest as one-off backups, because I saw the problem coming thanks to MobileMe's warning about massive changes due to sync.

In the Mariner Software email receipt, it says:

* Have a question or comment? Join the Mariner Software Discussion Forum.

http://www.marinersoftware.com/forum/

Like most forums, you have to register to post. However, once I registered, I was informed:

Before you can login and start using the forum, your request will be reviewed and approved. When this happens, you will receive another email from this address.

Lovely. Nothing like the warm welcome of customer support! Mariner offers no support email, so this is it: A discussion forum jailed off from the real world.

–Not that I expect much from the forums. The existing threads have very stale content, much of it about problems syncing, with no clear resolution. One poster even goes so far to advise everyone to skip MobileMe sync for MacJournal altogether, and use a direct syncing application to pass the database back and forth.

That's not what I wanted!

So MacJournal is turning out to be a major dud software purchase and likely a waste of $35. Maybe I will just stick with Bare Bones' Yojimbo, which I use for note-taking, and expand my use of it to include journaling. The problem there, though, is there's no way to export Yojimbo except one entry at a time, which again is pretty frustrating for an application in 2008.

*sigh*

Update September 16th:

Not one to just rant and quite, once my user account was manually approved today, I posted this issue in the Mariner forums. So far, the only response is from someone else experiencing the same problems. Alas.

Update September 19th:

No other responses. I would say this does not bode well for expecting any kind of support. Mariner MacJournal is not at all recommended by me.

About the author

Laura Scott is works in interactive design, web development and video, and is President of pingVision, based in Boulder, Colorado. Laura also can be found at:

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