14 DAY TRIAL // I don't know about you, but when I was a kid I used to snoop a lot into my sister's diary. It was fun to learn what she's been doing the past week and then rat her to my parents. This way I could be as impish as I wanted with no fear that my parents would find out and lecture me on things. The ace up my sleeve left my sister absolutely no choice but to submit to my blackmailing.
Great times, I tell you. But now, everything is computer assisted and you have to be a bit more cautious about snooping around as there are logs, passwords and all sorts of security enforced, depending on how sensitive the data is.
You can write all the activity of the day by means of a software equipped with all you need to preserve past happenings secure and organized.
Digital Diary comes with a $24.99 price tag and is designed to help you record all the day events, as well as reminders or contacts. The 15 days trial period is more than sufficient to properly test the application. There are no limited features and the only thing that is going to hinder the evaluation a bit is the nag screen constantly showing up.
Due to multi-account support, immediately after deploying the application, you have to create and account. It does not take long and a username and password (typed twice for confirmation) complete the job. This being done you can proceed to using the program.
The main application window is built on three sections. In the left hand side of the screen there all the options made available by the program, in the middle there are the contents of your diary while in the right hand part you have the actual view of the information.
Content window supports creating multiple folders, each of them being capable of containing numerous pages. Whenever creating a new content item you get to give it a name, provide a short description and add an image to it. There are 23 icons you can choose for a folder, but you can tweak this a little if you add ICO files in List Icons folder of application's installation directory.
Content editing window is very flexible, allowing you to customize the color of the text, font type, size, set page background color, insert smilies, alignment options (left, center, right, justify) or insert bullets. It is actually a mini-version of a regular text editor. At the bottom of the editing window more options await; new page inserting, page deletion, "Save" and "Save As" options, search function, printing and voice recording (if you have a mic).
Moving from one page to another is not a big deal as the controls in the lower right corner of the screen make the operation extremely easy. More than this, after perusing some pages you can navigate directly to the last one or the first one with a single click of the button.
As you can see from the images below this window also contains a Profile Info section giving away your username, last update of the profile, number of pages currently written, computer time and date as well as the page number currently in view.
Diary pages writing is the main purpose of the application and I have to say that this chapter is very well covered. But there is one thing that does not quite appeal to me. In a regular diary, there isn't much room for modifying past pages, while in Digital Diary you can do this effortlessly. I wish there was an option to lock the pages from editing. I think it would get closer to reality.
Digital Diary's Reminder is not extraordinary, but contains all the minimum options to write down the daily tasks. The window is quite simple and easy to use. All the reminders are available in the top left corner of the screen. Adding them in the list requires setting a subject, a description of the task to be dealt with, recurrence frequency, date and time of the alert.
Reminder options available from Login window let you enable reminders display as well as sound alert. You can choose any WAV file on your computer to alert you of a reminder and another option lets you enable the sound alert until reminder pop up is closed. Because the reminder runs a different process, you will be alerted even if Digital Diary is closed (the small tray icon can be hidden but RAM usage is quite high: 54MB).
Contacts screen is also minimalist in features and options, but it lets you add information on an entry and modify it whenever you feel like it. The options in this sense resume to storing birthday, phone numbers, contact email and add a photo. There is a limitation in adding specific details, but if you come to think of it, these represent the essential information about a person.
However, it would have been great if more options were available. You can add multiple phone numbers and email addresses but there are no proper fields for them (business details or proper fields for address, instant messenger identification etc.).
Mail feature is also limited in features and works only one way: sending the messages. You cannot receive and read any incoming emails and all its functionality is highly reduced. The only thing you can do with it is send text messages (no attachments).
RSS capabilities are also underdeveloped as not all types of RSS feeds are supported. The drab window displays the RSS links in the top left corner and beneath it there is the actual feed title. The trouble is that the content of the feed does not contain any links or images and looks quite dull. And if it weren't for "More Info" button in the top right part of the window I would say it is a waste of time. But this button will open the news web page right inside Digital Diary's RSS reader (and nothing more). You have no navigation buttons or address bar and all you can do in this sense is access the links available in the web page.
Options menu is the control panel of the entire application. It is in here where you can make the program automatically save your work at a defined time interval, change its looks (colors and font type, size), make all the settings for Mailer (give server details, password to your account etc.), modify profile details, add more RSS feeds or add images to the gallery.
The Good
The diary is very easy to use and very well built. It supports multiple pages and navigation is not too much of an effort. The pages can be customized in terms of background color (you can also add an image on your computer as background), font formatting and page alignment.
The support for multiple users only ads to its value as each profile is saved with its own settings.
Hyper Clipboard tool comes in handy if you need multiple sets of text in clipboard. I stopped inserting items when reaching 21, but the small tool seemed to be able to carry some more data.
The Bad
The nag screen is a real pain. It even popped up twice at the same time.
Some of the other features (RSS reader, Mailer, Reminder, Contacts) building up the application needs serious revision. In Reminder, for instance you have to save every change you make for each item. If you make a modification, move to a different item and then return, it will not be saved.
When closing the application it will always ask if you want to save the changes, though no modification took place.
The Truth
The diary itself is great, you have all the necessary options for editing the page (you can even insert smilies) and everything works fine. But $24.99 seems a bit pricey to use the application only for this as the other tools are not working properly.
The application is worth a shot, but it is a long way from being complete and I would not mind being able to add a video diary feature either.
Here are some DigitalDiaryshots of the application in action:
