Our wacky calendaring system

Just a word of warning: this is not going to be a useful entry so if you're in a rush please feel free to skip it. ☺

I've been working on the calendar view in MacJournal off and on the past few days and the view itself matured very quickly. Then I put that done to work on some stuff for the new searching architecture. Now that that's looking better, I went back to the calendar view to get multiple selection working (so you select multiple dates to only show entries from those days). All I can say is that whomever designed our calendar obviously hated humanity. I mostly blame Julius Caesar: he had the chance to make it a lot more sane than the previous Roman calendar and accomplished some of it but he didn't go far enough. Obviously Julius Caesar when he designed the calendar in 45 BC had never written any code before and never had to describe a calendar and multiple discontinuous ranges of date selections in C.

I'm not really saying Pope Gregory hated humanity. But a zero-based array of days with a upper-limit that is easily expressed as a power of two would have made my life a lot easier right now. ☺

I don't yet know if the new searching will have any special UI in 3.1. It might not be prudent for this release. The search field and calendar view might be only ways to control the search for now. A special search window like Mail's Rules configuration is planned but will take a little while to implement so it's up in the air for now. There are other things I want to accomplish for 3.1 as well, such as a real way to start auto-scrolling in Full Screen mode (shift-command-2 was never meant to be a permanent solution) and a way to publish a journal to .Mac. We will see in time. 3.0.1 will be out very soon (the code is all finished) and I might start with 3.1 alphas sooner rather than later to just get the new features out there and in use.

I guess this did turn into a more useful entry than I had planned, but that's what happens when I get off topic and on to something actually informative.

MacJournal 3.0.1 tonight or tomorrow

Since I'm already knee deep in 3.1 stuff, I should probably release 3.0.1 before the water gets any closer to my waist. I will finish up 3.0.1 and make it available before the end of the month since the betas expire on Tuesday (although you can always use 3.0 after they expire). It should be a really good release.

I will also release 2.6.1 separately using the appropriate fixes from 3.0.1 as promised within the next few days.

Back to WordPress

Thanks to the suggestions I got I was able to do some testing with publishing to WordPress from MacJournal. From just the test text that I had everything seemed to work okay, titles included. Now, I know some people have had problems so I just don't have the right tests here. Can some that has had problems publishing before (specifically with the title) please send me some text that exhibits this problem? An RTF file would be super. At this point any changes are probably too late for 3.0.1 as that will most likely come out by the end of this week but a 3.0.2 release is a possibility and there's always 3.1.

Calendars and WordPress

Two topics to mention today:

Calendar view

I worked on a calendar view for 3.1 last night and it came out pretty well. It's not too attractive yet but it's functional. I just have to integrate it into the MacJournal UI in a meaningful manner. I've got a few thoughts on the best way to do that:

1. Clicking on a day will bring you to the first entry in the current journal from that day
2. Optionally, clicking on a day which does not have an entry will create an entry for that day (and maybe the current time)
3. Shift- and Command-Clicking on different days will start a search and only show entries from the selected days.

#3 is the most ambitious because this is something MacJournal's search engine can not yet do. However I was also ruminating over some enhanced search features (such as having an Advanced Search window with a bunch of options and such), so this might be the first usage of that.

WordPress

Does anyone know of a WordPress blog somewhere that has development accounts? I have accounts at Blogger and LiveJournal for testing protocol compliance and I'd like to test WordPress as well as it seems to be gaining in popularity. But the WordPress site itself just lets you download the server software; they don't have any servers up and running themselves. So I'm a little bit of a bind there and if anyone has any tips I'd be much obliged.

MacJournal 3.0.1b2

http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/dev.html

- Fixed Stats panel on Jaguar
- Contractions are no longer considered seperate words in the frequency analysis in the Stats panel
- Print margin settings are saved in between launches
- Fixed some rare erratic behavior (caused by exceptions)
- Fixed some more List Style behavior

Plus the following new localizations:

- French
- Danish
- Spanish
- Japanese
- German

The final release is close at hand.

MacJournal 3.0.1b1

MacJournal 3.0.1b1 has been released. It contains a few bug fixes and some localizations. More localizations will be coming soon. Read the release notes and version history for details about 3.0.1; it should fix up some issues that some people are seeing, i.e. Services.

http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/dev.html

MacJournal 3.0

MacJournal 3.0 has come out over at <http://marinersoftware.com/>! Sorry about the lack of announcement here; the past week has been very very hectic for me. I'm way behind on my e-mail too, so apologies to anyone that has e-mailed me in the past few weeks. I will get back to everyone eventually, I promise!

I'm going to post a beta of 3.0.1 tonight as localizations are updated. We've already got one back and I'm expecting a few more very soon. In the meantime there are a few bug fixes in the beta.

Localization

Localization information will be sent out very soon for 3.0.1. I’ve made a few small changes to the menus since 3.0b2 and I’ve updated the strings files to the current state. I have one more minor change to make (an invisible change) and then I will package them all up.

Thoughts

So I've heard several different responses to the recent announcement. Many of the e-mails that I have received have been positive, which I appreciate greatly. There had been many people wondering in the past why this didn't happen a long time ago. So I felt emboldened by that. But some people seem to have the wrong idea about what is going on. I am not selling MacJournal to Mariner software. I will still do all the same things that I do now, but at the same time they will be out there telling people about it and raising its visibility. This isn't about the money at all. If time is money then I am in the red so far that it is not even worth considering. But that's not why I had been doing MacJournal and not why I will continue. Products have to evolve to survive and this is the next step in the evolution. Some people trust a product more if it is guaranteed to be around in a few years. While a few others seem to trust anything less if it costs money. So I guess the only conclusion there is that you can't please all of the people all of the time. I'm just going to keep trying to make the best application I can.

MacJournal has been free for a long time but it also wasn't very good for a while at the start. There was a point a while back when I was ready to stop developing it. I actually took about nine months off. But I got excited about working on it again and now this guarantees that I will be working on it for years to come. You don't want to put all of your data in a place where it's just going to get stuck and now it will keep evolving and improving for years.

I hope this clears up a little of the confusion. I know not everyone will agree with me and my reasoning. Some people will always think that I sold out because any time something costs money it must be inherently bad. All software should be free, perhaps because it is intangible. But I thank everyone out there for their support in this transition.

MacJournal 3.0b2 is out

This is the second beta release of MacJournal 3.0, formerly called 2.7. There was a development in the availability of MacJournal 3.0 that you should know about as you read this. MacJournal 3.0 will be republished by Mariner Software as a commercial product. It will be $30 with a $15 upgrade price for existing users. I will continue to develop MacJournal and still creative control over it. For scheduling reasons, 3.0 will have to be English-only. I regret this as I am very proud of the localizations that MacJournal supports and they are of great importance to me. But there just isn't time. After 3.0 is finalized and sent off to the CD factory, localization will begin and I hope to have a (free) update to it that includes all previously supported localization.

Important: MacJournal now has serialization. If you don't have a serial number it will time out after 7 days. For this beta only use the serial number "MacJournal Beta Serial Number" to get it to serialize.

Here are some of the changes for beta 2:

- Reorganized the menu bar. It's different, but I think it will be better. It fits in with the system more.
- Fixed some things like Underlining for Full Screen mode
- Improvements to List Style (current line will switch to the new style correctly now)
- Improved the Auto-scrolling in Full Screen mode (Shift-Command-2 for now)
- Added support for Smart Quotes (enabled by default)
- Blogger and LiveJournal sheets will respect the system settings for Web proxy.
- More Jaguar compatibility (Full screen mode should be working now)
- Implemented some new windows to deal with being a Commercial Product:
• End User License Agreement (EULA)
• Welcome window asking you to register
• Registration window for serial number

There are plenty more fixes; be sure to read the Version History.

Some of the larger changes and/or additions in 3.0 as a whole:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback

More Questions Answered

How much will it cost?

$30

Who will develop MacJournal in this new deal?

All development of MacJournal will continue to be done by me. Mariner's job begins when I hand off the final code for a version. I also retain control of what features will be added. I will just keep doing my thing and they will work to let people know about MacJournal in the meantime.

The Big News

There are big changes afoot for MacJournal. For the past three years, MacJournal has been a freeware product with no marketing. It has survived on word of mouth and a good review here and there. But that doesn't reach a large portion of the potential users. If you've got a quality product you have to let people know about it. That's why MacJournal will now be republished by Mariner Software as a commercial product! With this new arrangement, MacJournal finally has the marketing attention it deserves and it is poised to reach a whole new audience. In time you could see MacJournal in a box at your local Apple Store. It wasn't an easy decision because I like how things work right now and I could easily go on as before, but I think MacJournal deserves more. It has evolved into a very capable application and it is only getting better. I'm confident this will be a positive move for MacJournal and will ensure it's survival for years to come. More details will be available in the coming days, but here are some answers to questions you might have right now

When will this happen?

Soon. The goal is to have a new version of MacJournal for the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. This will be MacJournal 3.0 (formally known as 2.7). MacJournal 2.6 will be the last version of MacJournal as a freeware product.

What will happen to 2.6?

Version 2.6.1 will be released shortly before 3.0 and will address any serious issues with 2.6. The biggest issue that exists is with Multiple Spaces To Spaces (it can produce unexpected results over long selections of text).

Will there be upgrade pricing?

Yes, there will be an upgrade path for current users of MacJournal. Contact sales@marinersoftware.com for upgrade details. I will handle a few special cases personally.

What does this mean for the future?

Good things. This will ensure the future of MacJournal better than I can by myself. Who knows what the future holds and this deal will put MacJournal in a better position should anything unexpected happen. Mariner Software has competed against Microsoft™ Word for many years and is still around so they know a thing or two about that. I will continue to develop MacJournal for many versions to come. I have big plans for the next version after 3.0 and I already know it will be great

Is this just so you can get more money?

No, this is to gain a greater exposure for a product that I feel deserves it. I am not a good marketer (marketeer?) and I can't get it into stores by myself. There are a lot of people that might like MacJournal and this is a great way to let them know about it. Expect to see MacJournal show up in more places and be more visible.

When is 3.0 coming out?

3.0 will be out on January 4th. It will be available on CD and as a download with a time-limited trial. Stop by and see us at booth #2410 at MacWorld in San Francisco to chat if you can and pick up a copy. I'll try to post on the News page when I will be there.

10.3.7 is good for you

Mac OS X 10.3.7 was released today via Software Update. Users of MacJournal should update to 10.3.7 because it fixes a bug in the operating system that has afflicted MacJournal for quite some time. If you copied some text out of Safari that contained pictures and pasted it into MacJournal (or used a Service to get the text in), MacJournal might crash when saving the text. There was nothing I could do about it except wait for Apple to fix it. And fix it they did today. So 10.3.7 is a recommended update from me; I'm running it right now with no problems.

MacJournal 2.7 hits beta

Download the release at danschimpf.com.

Welcome to the first beta release of MacJournal 2.7! This release fixes a lot of problems with the newer stuff introduced in the alpha. Specifically, Full Screen mode is much improved. It now has its own preference pane and some cool settings that you can customize for it. There is a new look for the scrollbar that should make it fit in a little better. Tagging along with Full Screen mode is Text Zoom, which finally has working line wrapping when zoomed past 100%. Huzzah!

As a refresher, this is how the different milestones for this release will look:

Alpha: all features are in and functional. No known crashers. No features will be added afterwards.
Beta: all UI is frozen and localizations will begin to be updated. No known bugs.

This is an beta release which means there might still be bugs lurking. A backup of your data will be made automatically, but whenever you use pre-release software (from any source) it's good to back up your important data.

Here are some of the changes for beta 1:

- New preference pane for Full Screen customizations
- New scrollbar for full screen mode
- Text zoom new can wrap lines
- No longer fully capturing the display when entering full screen mode (a la games). This means some other things will start working, such as Exposé, Command-Tab, text dragging, and contextual menus.
- Selecting a number of lines and then changing the List Style will apply that list style to each selected line (not just the first as before)
- Fixed a bunch of preferences that were broken by a big rewrite of the Prefs window
- Journals created in the Journals drawer will end up at the top-level in more cases, which is usually what you want. You can always drag them around.

There are plenty more fixes; be sure to read the Version History.

Some of the larger changes and/or additions in 2.7 as a whole:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

Beta 1 later tonight or tomorrow

Expect 2.7b1 to come out either late tonight or tomorrow evening. Things are going well and it's in late testing. Localization is the concern here as all of the localization files will be sent out after beta 1 is finalized. It should be a great release though. Full Screen and Text Zoom are the big winners for this release.

MacJournal 2.7a1 is released

Welcome to the first alpha release of MacJournal 2.7! This release will (and already does) have a metric boatload of new features and changes. Some of the smaller fixes will be rolled into a smaller 2.6.1 release. Please please read through the Version History file to see what has changed. I know it's long but it's good to know what has changed if you're going to use an alpha release. For this release, this is how the different milestones will look:

Alpha: all features are in and functional. No known crashers. No features will be added afterwards.
Beta: all UI is frozen and localizations will begin to be updated. No known bugs.

This is an alpha release which means there might still be bugs lurking. A backup of your data will be made automatically, but whenever you use pre-release software (from any source) it's good to back up your important data.

Here are some of the larger changes and/or additions in 2.7a1:

- Nested journals. Drag a journal into another journal to put it inside the other one. This has been a long time in the making.
- Manual sorting of entries. Drag entries (or journals) around inside their journals to manually place them were you want them. Note that this disables sorting for every journal when you do this. Re-enable it in the Entry menu if you choose.
- Wiki links. Create links that link to other entries automatically by formatting it in the "wiki" style (Google for "wiki" for a full explanation). Short version: something like "CamelCase" in your entry text will become a link to an entry named "CamelCase" or "Camel Case" or even "Camel, Case!" in the same journal.
- Sort Lines, Change Case, Remove Line Breaks. New text clean-up options in the normal place.
- Copy As HTML. The same functionality found in exporting to HTML but without all the hassle of creating a file.
- Full Screen. View menu item, toolbar item, and the F8 key all bring the text area of the window full screen so you can concentrate just on the text, or make a presentation.
- Menu Item Reorganization. Moved some menu items to make the menus shorter and put things in the expected places.
- Bug Fixes. Bugs have been fixed. High priority fixes will be in 2.6.1. The crasher in "Multiple Spaces to Space" has been fixed here.

Those are just the big ones. There are smaller ones (like Smileys) that are also there. Please read the version history file! If you had the Hidden Preferences window enabled in 2.6 (via the "IncludeHiddenPreferencesMenuItem" preference) note that it has changed. You need to re-set the preference in the Terminal using the new key "IncludeHiddenPreferences" since the Hidden Prefs are now found in the actual Preferences window.

Reporting Bugs

Please let me know about any bugs you find in this release as soon as possible. Use the "Report A Bug" menu item in the Help menu to see a list of known issues for your current build (as they arise). You can also automatically create a new e-mail.

If MacJournal crashes on you, look for a crash log in ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter and include that in your report. If there's some funny behavior, try looking in the Console (in /Applications/Utilities/) and include any output related to MacJournal in your report. Please be specific about things that you are doing that aren't working out, whether it's a crash or a behavior that you don't like. Also, include what release of MacJournal you are using in your e-mail. I appreciate your feedback!

Alpha soon

I promise: alpha soon. I'm really behind in my e-mail, which always makes me feel bad. Plus Thanksgiving is coming up. I'll try to get it out before then so I can work on it over the break. It really is a solid release (it's actually beta or even final candidate quality), but all of the other things are getting in the way right now.

Scheduling comes more into focus

The scheduling for the next update to MacJournal is starting to work itself out and I just wanted to let y'all know about it. But first, a word about 2.6.1: there will indeed be a MacJournal 2.6.1. The primary driver for this is a problem with "Multiple Spaces to Space" in the Clean Up menu. It can cause things to go a little wacky if used over large areas of text. So there's a few small things that will be fixed as well. No new features, just some good fixes. 2.6 was a fantastic release in terms of total amount of changes vs. bugs found after shipping. 2.6.1 should be out within two weeks; I have all the bugs fixed in 2.7 so it's just a matter of bringing those changes over to the 2.6 code base and integrating them in there.

Before we get to 2.7, I want to mention printing though. 2.6 corrected some printing appearance issues that people had been complaining about, but it appears to have to changed some other things. To me, it seems like you want the printed output to match the screen exactly and anything different is a bug. But apparently TextEdit prints stuff to A4 differently than I would have expected. It's kind of shrunken, except I don't know why or to what degree. So I'm kind of in a quandary here: I don't know what's really correct for the different paper sizes.

But anyway, back to the issue at hand. The first alpha of 2.7 should be finished this week. 2.7 has a much shorter schedule than 2.6, so the milestones will be defined a little bit differently this time around. The alpha milestone will represent "feature complete" in the traditional sense: all the expected features will be present and at least functional (if a little incorrect and/or buggy at times). This is what alpha typically means and this time I'll stick to it. There just isn't time in the schedule to keep adding things like I have in the past post-alpha. The good news is that there already has been a metric boatload of changes and 2.7 won't be lacking for good stuff. There are some things on the questionable side that may have to get cut (page numbering is the prime example there). There may only be one alpha depending on how it goes and beta might hit come start of December. Beta will mean that all the features are in and all bugs are squashed for the most part. It will mostly be for localization purposes; they will all need to get updated again (however it should be lighter than 2.6). Then hopefully 2.7 will get out the door before the end of the year. That's the plan anyway.

Progress Marches On

Yes dear friends, work on MacJournal 2.7 has begun in earnest. If you've noticed the recent changes that have gone in you can see a lot of nifty features have been added. As I've said in e-mail many a time, a lot of this was done in the 2.6 timeframe but was disabled for testing reasons. I just couldn't make sure everything was satisfactory for 2.6, so I postponed it. That was when I thought I was going to release 2.6 in July or August, but oh well. Nested journals, lists, Wiki links; it's all good now. A lot of hidden preferences have been "promoted" into the real preferences. In fact, I took the time to completely rewrite the Preferences window on Sunday. It's a lot more flexible now, which has allow me to integrate the Hidden Preferences window directly into it as a pane right alongside the others (but will still only show up if you have the hidden preference set for it).

Talking about the Hidden Preferences window, I discovered that a whole portion of it is busted in 2.6. The Drawers group in the "Syntax" tab wasn't hooked up at all to anything. So anything you do there won't matter at all. It's not a big deal; you can apply the same preferences from the Terminal (instructions here), but it's just unfortunate that the pleasant UI doesn't work. If I do a 2.6.1 I'll fix that, but at this point it's looking like that won't be needed. 2.7 will be out a lot quicker that 2.6 was, so it'll be okay.

Tonight I'll probably work on allowing journals to be empty. Right now you have to have at least one entry (or journal) in a journal at all times, but it would be nice to be able to have a completely empty journal. It's kind of expected, since you can have empty mailboxes in Mail. There are about a thousand other examples of empty containers in other applications too. I don't really remember why I did it in the first place. ☺

(By the way, the little smiley faces that you've seen in my posts over the last few weeks actually come from MacJournal. I'm writing this inside MacJournal right now and will post from inside the app. There is a hidden preference in 2.6 to discover smiley and frowny faces and convert them to the Unicode characters you see above. This is now a standard feature in 2.7.)

Keyboard Navigation in 2.6

One of the things I tried to address in MacJournal 2.6 is better keyboard navigation. For those of us with laptops, keeping our hands on the keyboards as long as possible is very advantageous and programs that make every attempt to facilitate this prove a lot more usable than those that don't. To that end, you can do just about everything you want in MacJournal from just the keyboard. The biggest sticking point is getting the window focus where you need it easily. To do that, you can now use the F-keys to move around the window. F1 puts the focus in the main text view, F2 for the topic field, F3 for the last drawer opened, and F4 for the search field. You can also use the Tab key to move between the first three things listed (as an aside, it's not really possible to tab out of a toolbar item right now, but this is a limitation of the operating system itself). Obviously pressing tab in the main text view will give you a regular text tab, but you can use Shift-Tab to get back to the topic field (Shift-Tab is like reverse-tab). If you have multiple drawers open, you can press F3 multiple times to cycle through them, and pressing tab inside the drawer should get you out of it.

With a little help from Full Keyboard Navigation in Panther you can access all of the menu items and toolbar items to access all of the sheets (some have keyboard equivalents too). I'd like to bring the Keywords sheet up specifically, as that used to be impossible to navigate with the keyboard. Now when the sheet drops down the focus should be on the table view. From here you can tab down to the "+" button to add a keyword, or you can just start typing. If the focus is on the table view you can just start typing and your keystrokes will get added to a new keyword. I wish more tables worked like this. ☺

Talking about things I wish more tables did, all of the tables in the drawers now support type-selecting. This means that you can start typing the first few letters and the app will look through any visible items and select whatever matches. It's important to note that it only searches the visible items. This means that entries inside journals that are not expanded will not get taken into account (but items that are just not on the screen but would be visible if you scrolled down are). This is to reduce the "noise" that might make it hard to find exactly what you want.

It was impossible in 2.5 to use the arrow keys in the journals drawer in 2.5. This was because you couldn't select journals so you couldn't move past any journal. This restriction has been removed and you can now move about the journals like you would any hierarchical view in the OS. Use the Right arrow key on a journal to expand it (will unlock if necessary). And, special to MacJournal, you can use Command-Up to move up a level in the hierarchy (from an entry to its parent journal). Command-Down also works as expected. This will become very helpful when nested journals arrive. And, just because there isn't a better place to mention it, press Option-D to cycle through the view modes for that table (Date, Topic, Text, Combined).

Keyboard navigation is one of the areas that improved by leaps and bounds in 2.6. There may be a few other things that I'm not thinking of right now, but those are the large areas.