Tools for iwrite.4.life

The Journal Explorer

The Journal Explorer™ is not a tool but the container for all iwrite.4.life™ tools. Out of the box it docks to the left window margin but you can "tear it off" and place it wherever you want. This gives you a lot of flexibility to adapt the screen layout of iwrite.4.life to your personal preference.

The Month Calendar Tool

A free tool that is included in the iwrite.4.life™ setup package, the Month Calendar tool is a great way to see the days that have journal entries at a glance. You can then navigate to your entries with a single mouse click. Many journal writers find it quite motivating too to have an immediate visual representation of their journal writing activity or (inactivity) over time.

Depending on your screen size and your personal work style, you can adapt the dimension of the calendar as you see fit. View just a single vertical column to save space; maybe even reduce the calendar display to a single month. Or, on the other hand, dock the Journal Explorer to the bottom of your screen and make the Month Calendar four or five rows high and you'll have an overview of three or more years of journal writing.

The Journal Content Tool

Another free tool included with iwrite.4.life, the Journal Content tool is a structured table of contents of all your journal items. You see your journal items sorted by Topic, InfoType, and date. Best of all, you can change the sort sequence any time. For example, you may want to have the items sorted by InfoType first, date second, and only then by Topic. And of course you can name and rename all your Topics and InfoTypes to your heart's content.

The Full-text Search Tool

Finally, the third free tool is the Full-text Search tool, which as its name implies, lets you search your journal for any word, phrase, or text pattern. You can browse the search results sequentially or jump directly to any of the journal items found by double-clicking the item in the search results window. If you pause the mouse cursor over an item on the search results list, you will even see a tooltip with the first few sentences of the journal item to help you decide whether you want to open the journal item or not.

For a more advanced search, you can open the Advanced Search Dialog. The word list you see on the right hand side of the dialog will update in real time as you type your search request so you will immediately see all similar words in your journal including the frequency of their occurrence.

You can search for synonyms; you can search for words that sound similar to your search term, and much more. The product documentation goes into more detail about the advanced search options on this dialog.

Additional Tools

The tools described above are powerful ways to access and navigate the information in your journal. You get them at no additional cost if you buy the iwrite.4.life system. Additional tools are already under development. They will be available for purchase and will work seamlessly with the iwrite.4.life system thanks to the new plug-in architecture.