Design Philosophy

OpenJournal is a simple note-taking application. Each day represents a separate entry that can be navigated using a calendar widget. Each journal is stored inside a database that can be either a local file (*.jnl) or a database inside a MariaDB server.

For writers: as detailed in Description & Setting by Ron Rozelle, keeping a writer’s journal is a good way to improve writing abilities. Writers can record plots outlines, observations, descriptions, details, dialog lines, etc…
For anyone: keeping a daily diary can help you achieve several goals. It can help you organize your thoughts, records daily success, and set your next goals to keep the insensitive high. Writing down feelings can help you self-reflect and relieve stress, keeping a trace of situations and feelings.
For professionals: writing down tasks to achieve and expected jobs duration can help you organize your day. The possibility to set alarms can help to manage available time and not forget any meeting.

User Interface

The user interface of OpenJournal is designed to be as simple as possible. It is constituted of 3 resizable panels:

The editor panel.
The calendar panel.
The preview panel.

A toolbox provides shortcuts to the Markdown syntax and a menu bar to create and open journals.

Editor

The editor is based on QMarkdowTextEdit and supports the Markdown syntax and find and replace. It supports smart drag and drop for images and texts. Dropping an image from a local folder or from an Html link will copy the image in the journal and reference it locally. Plain text can be added by dropping a text file in the editor. The text will be inserted at the cursor location.

Calendar

The calendar provides a quick way to navigate through the journal.

Preview

The preview provides a way to visualize the rendered Markdown document. It can be used to previsualize the result of an entry and to comfortably read a journal.