[missing-sync-palmos-talk] Re: DayNotez or alternate journaling application with Desktop component? (Connie Bauer)

[Mark Hadfield]

I too am a DayNotez fan who would love to see a Mac desktop (or  
better still a conduit to one of the many excellent Mac journalling  
applications).

However, I've recently started experimenting with something else.  
I've been using Mac NoteTaker (Palm application and conduit) with  
TextMate (rather excellent text editor).

http://homepage.mac.com/wis/Personal/programs/NoteTaker/NoteTaker.html
http://www.macromates.com/

NoteTaker provides a hierarchical organisation of text notes on the  
Palm which are two-way-sync'd via a conduit to an identical hierarchy  
of folders and text files on the Mac. So it's extremely flexible. And  
it's free :-)

You can browse the notes on the Mac using Finder and edit them using  
any text editor such as TextEdit. However, I've found TextMate to be  
rather excellent for the task. Drop the NoteTaker folder onto  
TextMate's icon and it will produce a single window which has a side  
draw which shows the folder structure (see the screen shot on  
MacroMate's home page). TextMate calls this a project and you can  
save the project to open later, so I have a "NoteTaker" project on my  
desktop. TextMate contains some great text editing features which are  
handy for note taking / journalling, including spell-checking,  
templates and indent/outdent, bookmarks and clipboard history. It's  
also massively scriptable.

I'm still experimenting, but I can foresee me moving all of my  
MemoPad notes and all of my DayNotez journals into this combination.  
For journalling, I created a folder called "Journal" and within that  
I create a folder for the year containing folders for each month.  
These monthly folders then contain my journal entries. The nice thing  
is that NoteTaker names each new note with the date and time by  
default (you can change it), so it's a perfect fit for a journal.

The main downside is that you don't get a single time-linear view of  
your journal. Though I'm pretty sure it would be possible to script  
something very suitable in TextMate (if I do get around to producing  
a script then I'll post here). On the upside, TextMate has an  
excellent project-wide search (and though it's not free, it's not  
expensive either).

I hope this is helpful.