All My Journals is probably the simplest dedicated Journal keeping software out there. There were many features that could have been added but weren’t, and many features that might have benefited a small number of users that were deliberately left out.

Why did we do this?

Many people say they want to keep a Journal or Diary – something they can refer back to years down the road so they know what they were thinking or doing back in 2011. Some of these people succeed, but most do not. They start off on the right track, make a few entries for that first week, then forget about it of simply drift away.

Those who fail often fail because organizing their Journal on their PC is too difficult. If they use MS Word or another word processor, they have to remember where they are storing their files, and they have to create new files each week or month.

Others worry about the security of their journal and what might happen if their husband or mother were to stumble across it. So they censor themselves or they give up after a few weeks, and if they do censor themselves, they quickly lose heart, as what use is a journal if you’re leaving out all the juicy bits.

This is where All My Journals comes in. It’s as simple as I could make it, contains only those features necessary for keeping a bare-bones journal, and addresses the issues outlined above so the user doesn’t have to.

There are no decisions to make regarding files and storage, as the software makes these for you. A single password can be set at the application level, meaning nobody can open the software or read your journals but you. All you have to concern yourself with is clicking the icon and writing.

All My Journals is the perfect software for keeping track of and monitoring the progress of your exercise and fitness program. All you need to do is create a new Journal called ‘Exercise Diary’, ‘My Fitness Journal’, or something similar. Then, each day, you make an entry detailing what you did that day.

Did you run the 5 kilometers you were supposed to, do all those sit ups and flexes, lift the weights you planned to? By writing all of this down in a dedicated Journal, you make it harder to lie to yourself about your true progress, and you can easily refer back to previous weeks and months to get an accurate portrayal of what you really did.

It would be great of we could all rely on our memories, but memory is notoriously unreliable when it comes to things like this, as we often assume we did more than we actually did.

So, if you want to keep an accurate exercise and fitness diary, download the latest version of All My Journals, and get started.

http://www.allmyjournals.com/download.html

The trial version runs for 45 days, so you have all that time to decide if it’s the right software for you.

I never intended All My Journals to be used for planning the week or month ahead, but lately I find that that is one of the uses I put it to. I have a journal called ‘Daily Scratchpad’ that I use to leave notes for myself tomorrow or next week.

It may be something simple like a one line entry under next Tuesday saying: “Call the gardener to come around and cut the grass”, or it could be an entry for Monday, typed out before I stopped work on Friday, outlining what needs to be done first thing Monday morning.

And when Monday or Tuesday roll around, and All My Journals opens on the current day, I’m faced with these messages I left myself days, weeks, or even months ago.

So in theory, I should never forget a birthday again!

And the best part is, because I have many different Journals in All My Journals, all  of these week ahead entries are kept completely separate from my other Journals.

If you keep a journal and you’re honest about what you write in that Journal, then privacy is going to be important to you. After all, you wouldn’t want your nosy daughter or husband reading your thoughts on Twilight and Ashton Kutcher.

Software like MS Word does allow you to password protect an individual document, but messing around with all those documents can be time consuming. All My Journals makes this as simple as possible by allowing you to password protect all of your Journals with a single password.

This means that once a password is set, no one will be able to open All My Journals or read what you have written unless they know your password. Setting a password means you could even install All My Journals onto a thumb drive and carry it around with you without worrying about losing it and having somebody in the office read your journals.

As far as private journal software goes, it doesn’t get any more secure or private than All My Journals. Don’t believe me? Download the free 45 day trial version and try it out for yourself. You won’t be disappointed.

http://www.allmyjournals.com/download.html

The most basic function of All My Journals is as a personal journal. This is what it was designed for and this is what it is best at – allowing you to write stuff down. The free version, which allows for a single, never-ending journal, was designed for users of just this type of journal.

What is a personal journal?

It’s somewhere for you to document your thoughts and actions on a daily basis. All My Journals was designed to take the pain and difficulty out of keeping just such a diary or journal. Yes, you could use Microsoft Word to keep a journal, but then you have to worry about creating documents, where to save it to, finding it again, etc.

With All My Journals, this is all done for you. All you have to do is write. Don’t believe me? To get a simple picture of how All My Journals works, take a look at the screenshots, or watch the introductory video:

http://www.allmyjournals.com/screenshots.html

If you like what you see here, download the free 45 day trial version and try it out for yourself.

http://www.allmyjournals.com/download.html

All My Journals is the perfect software for anyone looking to keep a daily record of their health and wellbeing. We already have users who use it to document their exercise regimes, and one user who uses it to keep a record of the medication she takes every day.

As many of us know, you can’t always rely on your memory to keep an accurate record of your actions, and when it comes to something as important as which pills you took, how many you took, and when you took them, it’s always better to write it down.

Medical symptoms can also be stored easily in All My Journals. How you felt each day, how your injury has progressed, etc. That way, when you go to see your doctor in a few weeks you can tell him or her exactly how you’ve been. The simple printing options in All My Journals make printing off a month’s entries for a single Journal a piece of cake, and the password protection enables you to keep all your medical information private.

So if this sounds like something you would benefit from, download the free 45 day trial version today, and try it out for yourself.

http://www.allmyjournals.com/download.html

I’m always interested to hear the varied ways that users use my software, and All My Journals is proving to have even more uses than I imagined. While I anticipated people using the software for simple, ordinary, diary type journaling, and even for more specific and targeted journals such as documenting your health and your exercise regime, I hadn’t considered its use as a Prayer Journal.

So, thanks to Caroyln for letting me know how she uses All My Journals. If you fancy keeping a Prayer Journal like Caroyln, you should first download the free 45 day trial, then create a new journal called “Prayer Journal”, and get started.

http://www.allmyjournals.com/download.html

The learning curve with All My Journals is almost non-existent. All you do is open the software and start typing. The user interface combines website design with desktop design, in a way that even PC novices should have little difficulty understanding.

Are you one of those people who dream in crazy technicolor, then wake up in the morning in a haze with crazy snippets of last night’s adventures pouring through your mind?

Do you keep a dream journal or have you ever thought of keeping a dream journal? You never know what patterns might turn up when you start writing down all those weird and wonderful snapshots.

All My Journals is the perfect journaling software for keeping a record of your dreams. All you have to do is create a new Journal called Dream Journal, and you’re good to go. The software will always open on today’s date for you, so no matter how bleary eyed you might when when you get up in the morning, you always know you’ll be typing in the right place. There is no saving, or creating of files, or anything else that might confuse you first thing in the morning when you are barely awake, and your dream journal is kept separate from any other journals you might have.

And best of all, it has a great built in search feature that lets you search an entire Journal for words or patterns.

You can download the 45 Day trial version of All My Journals here, and try it out for yourself at no cost:

http://www.allmyjournals.com/download.html

It’s difficult to judge in advance how popular new software might become, especially when it’s aimed at users you’ve never targeted before. How many people actually keep a daily diary or a daily journal?

Download.com, once the number 1 resource for downloadable software, provides some insight. Though it’s now only a shadow of what it once was, the site does provide historic download figures for software going back years, and goes some way to answering the question of the popularity of journal keeping software in general.

Falling under the Calendar & Time Management Software section, there are many software packages designed for Journal writers with download figures running into the hundreds of thousands – impressive figures.

While this doesn’t give any indication of the potential popularity of a new journal product, and it has nothing at all to say about online journal keeping sites, it does provide a good picture of the general popularity of journal keeping as a whole.

A heck of a lot of people keep journals, and they use software to do it.

I’ve tried to make All My Journals as easy to use as possible, and if the number of confusing support emails is anything to go by, it looks like I’ve been largely successful. Not completely of course, as there is always room for improvement.

A recent change to the user interface of the licensed version includes a second drop down menu next to what used to be the “Change Month” link. This has been changed to “Month – Day” where the Day link now opens a drop down listing the days of the month.

My initial design presupposed that users would discover the Page Up / Page Down shortcuts and would use them to navigate through the days of the month, but despite dropping a big shortcut button on the sidebar, this hasn’t happened. Hence the new drop down.

I’m not entirely satisfied with it, and will probably change it over the coming weeks, but it does make navigating without using shortcuts just that little bit easier.

And on the subject of shortcuts, for the keyboard warriors out there three new shortcuts have been added to open up the Day, Month and Year drop downs:

• Ctrl + D for the day drop down
• Ctrl + M for the month drop down
• Ctrl + G for the Year drop down (Y is already taken by the Redo command in the editor – can’t go messing about with established and recognized shortcuts)

All My Journals was designed for people who want to keep a journal or diary – but not for all of them. It was created with a certain user in mind: a diary writer who just wants to write.

Do you use emoticons when you write? Do you copy and paste pictures you found on the Internet into your journal? Do you spend time adjusting fonts and getting the paragraph settings just right on each page?

If this sounds familiar, then All My Journals is not the software for you. I make no apologies for this. Software that tries to please all people ends up pleasing no one.

The premise behind All My Journals is that the whole point of keeping a journal is that you’re keeping a journal, not playing around with software. The software should disappear into the background and let you get on with putting your thoughts or words down.

If you have to stop and think about the software, if you have to scratch your head and ask yourself: “Now, how do I do this?“, then the software is failing.

All My Journals is as simple and as intuitive as I could make it. There are few decisions to be made by users, and even fewer options to choose from. Many common options that appear on the Preferences dialogs of other software are not present in All My Journals. I’ve already made those decisions so you don’t have to. If you really, really want to make those decisions yourself, well… I can think of two Journaling products off the top of my head that have them all, and then some, so you might want to take a look at those.

The most difficult part of designing this product was taking features out, not putting them in. Will I be adding more features later? Yes, but very few. There are only two features on the All My Journals to do list at this moment.

All My Journals was designed to be the perfect journaling software for one type of user. I hope that’s you.