RedNoteBook is a graphical daily journal tool with plenty of features that is sure to please nearly every level of user. It has an outstanding interface that allows for drag and drop support as well as exporting, backup, and statistics. And in this Ghacks entry, I am going to show you how to install and make use of this handy tool.

Features

Let’s take a look at some of the features of RedNoteBook.

• PDF support
• Drag and drop interface
• Edit and preview mode
• Category cloud
• Entry tags
• Text format
• In line images
• Export to PDF, HTML, Latex, or plain text
• Multiple journals
• Auto save
• Open source
• Translated into 16 languages
• Free

And much more. Now let’s install.

Installation

The installation is simple. Just follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “rednotebook” (no quotes).
3. Mark RedNoteBook for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.
5. When complete, close the Add/Remove Software tool.
6. That’s it. You are now ready to start keeping your journal.

Usage

Figure 1

To start RedNoteBook click Applications > RedNoteBook which will bring up the main window (see Figure 1). As you can see the developers have taken it upon themselves to create some nice documentation for the first four entries (regardless of what day you installed the application). These entries serve as a very easy to use quick start guide. So instead of repeating what the developers have already done, I will show you some of the features they haven’t listed.

Adding images

One of the first things that tripped me up with RedNoteBook was adding images. RedNoteBook clearly supports drag and drop. So you can open up your file manager and drag and drop images to a journal entry. But when you drop the images into a journal entry what you will see is something like:

[""file:///home/jlwallen/Pictures/27058-Overflowed"".jpg]

It wasn’t until I realized there is two modes for RedNoteBook (Edit and Preview) that this made sense. By default, RedNoteBook starts every entry in Edit mode. So when you drag and drop images the image will show up as a link to the image. It’s not until you switch to preview mode that you will then be able to actually see the images. This should have been all too obvious. Now you don’t have to have that same “head slapping moment” as I had. ;-)

Annotations and Categories

One of the best features of RedNoteBook is the ability to annotate and categorize your daily entries. This allows you to search your entire journal for various subjects. The right hand side of RedNoteBook is dedicated for what is called Annotations in Categories. You create categories for your journal entry and then annotate your categories.

For example: You can have a category called “Meals” and in that category you can annotate the list of meals you had that day. To create a new category right click an empty spot in the right pane and select Add New Entry. When you do this a new window will open (see Figure 2) where you can then enter the category in the top drop down. You have to add a new entry before you can actually hit OK. After you have created a new category, that category will then be available, via drop down, for future usage.

Final thoughts

There are a ton of really great features that make RedNoteBook an ideal journaling tool for just about any type of user. The only thing you can not really do (without some work) is publish your journal. You could export the journal as an HTML document and then upload that document…but that’s more work than necessary. Maybe in future releases the developer will create an auto-publishing feature to various blog sites?

The GNOME Activity Journal is not a file browser, but a logger of activity. It uses the Zeitgeist engine to keep track of the files/websites/contacts/etc you have interacted with and tracker to get the current state of files. It’s very handy to use if you are constantly struggling to remember exactly what you did and what day you did it. In this article I will show you how to install and use this handy tool.

A preface

Before we start on this little journey, I must say there is a bug or two in the current iteration of GAJ. The developers are currently working on a new migration script from the old ontology to the new. What this is causing is the inability of GAJ to track web sites. This does not affect GAJs ability to track the files you have used, so the tool is still very usable. Look for future updates to resolve the issue of not being able to track your interaction with the web.

Another issue is that the package from the Fedora 13 repositories is broken. So if you are using Fedora 13, and you expect GAJ to work, you will be disappointed. This issue will hopefully be resolved very soon.

With that said, on with the show.

Installation

Installation is very simple. Just follow these steps:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “gnome activity journal” (no quotes).
3. Mark Gnome Activity Journal for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. The above steps will also install the necessary dependencies. Once installed, in order to start up the GAJ, click Applications > Accessories > Activity Journal and the main (and only) window will start.

Using the GNOME Activity Journal

Figure 1

When you fire up GAJ what you see will, obviously, depend upon how much activity you have had. If you take a look at Figure 1 you can see the user I use for writing purposes hasn’t had much activity over the last few days. Figure 1 deceivingly show an HTML page that has been accessed. That page was actually a page that had been saved to the hard drive.

As you open and interact with files you will see the “Today” column update almost immediately. If you are curious about a particular file you can hover your mouse over that file to get a thumbnail preview. If you want to re-open that file you can click on it and the file will open in the chosen, default application for that file type.

What I really like about this tool is that it, as the name would imply, serves as a journal of what files I have accessed during the calendar year. You can scroll backwards and forwards (using the left or right-pointing arrows) to any date you want.

Final thoughts

If you are looking for a tool that will keep track of your daily activity on your machine GAJ might be the right tool. Even though it has a few bugs in it’s current form, it is still very useful.

RedNotebook has been designed to provide a better and more comfortable experience for regular note taking tasks. The program is available for multiple language and the operating systems Windows and Linux.

The main interface is divided into three columns. The left sidebar displays the calendar, the word cloud and search, the right sidebar tags and categories and the main column the current journal entry.

Each journal entry consists of a date, tags, categories and the information that the user wants to record.

RedNotebook supports not only textual information but also pictures, files and links but unfortunately no videos.

Several formatting options are available including bullet lists, text formatting, titles and lines. It is not as sophisticated as the controls in Word but it is sufficient for this task.

Here are some of the additional features offered by RedNotebook:

• Enter text for individual days and navigate using a fancy calendar
• Add Categories to days and fill them with content
• Tag your entries
• Format your text bold, italic or underlined
• Insert Images, files and links to websites
• Links and mail addresses are recognized automatically
• (Live-) Search
• Automatic saving
• Backup to zip archive
• Word Clouds with most often used words and tags
• Templates for each weekday and arbitrarily named ones
• Export the journal to HTML, Latex or plain text
• Graphical preferences dialog
• You can have multiple journals

Some of the interesting features are the ability to maintain multiple journals, export the journals at any time into various formats either locally or remotely and to use templates to speed up the note taking.

RedNotebook can be downloaded from the project’s website over at Sourceforge where it is available for Linux and Windows.

By default a new screenshot is created every 5 seconds in png format that is covering the whole screen. The taking of new screenshots can be started and stopped in the application and it is definitely a good idea to pause while entering user data or other personal data.

The user can select several different formats for the screenshots and play the “movies” on a day by day basis. The program can be configured to delete images that are older than a selected number of days.

I can see some uses for this, for example to create a production diary when working in applications like Photoshop or a video editing application. The pro version comes with several handy features like excluding certain applications from the process.