Record The Daily Details Of Your Life On Your Mac

How many of your life’s memorable events are in photographs? Is there a better way to record the daily details of your life? I ask because of a visit to my great grandmother last week.

Photographs? Yes, she has a few thousand dating back almost 90 years. Scrapbook? That, too. Daily Diary? Over 60 years of diary entries chronicling children and grandchildren. No. She’s not a Mac user, but I am. Here’s how to record the daily details of your life on a Mac (go beyond mere photographs).

iPhoto Is Not Your Life

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. My Mac is loaded with enough photos to print an encyclopedia of 10-million words (do the math).

That’s the problem. It’s just photos, sometimes 10 photos of the same thing from a different angle.

What about the details of the scene?

Will I be able to remember all the details of a photograph in 10 years or 30 years? Probably not. My great grandmother’s wisdom became apparent because she chronicled so many events of her life, generation after generation.

Mac Tools To Chronicle Your Life

How does a Mac user go about recording the details of life beyond iPhoto? Actually, it doesn’t take much because the Mac is a rich playground of scrapbooks, diaries, and journals.

myDiary - For ease of use it’s difficult to top myDiary. The one window interface makes it easy to know what to do.

Add daily entries, add photos, even add video clips and audio clips. myDiary is a combination digital scrapbook and diary, fully password protected, encrypted, and ties right in with your Mac’s iSight camera.

The full version is $20 but there’s also a myDiary Free. Consider it a lite version of myDiary minus a few features.

The Video Diary - It’s easy to see the blurring of lines between a scrapbook and a diary (or, journal). With a scanner, your Mac can hold almost anything a regular scrapbook would hold—and more.

The Video Diary is exactly what it sounds like. Use your Mac’s iSight camera to record your day’s thoughts ala Star Trek’s personal log (or, Captain’s Log).

Record and playback diary entries within My Video Diary. Or, import videos from your iPod nano.

MiLife - I’m not sure what the difference is between diary and journal, though MiLife claims to do both.

Add personal notes, customize entries in a variety of fonts, colors, and background colors. Drop in movies and photos and audio. MiLife even tracks weather. But there’s more.

Bookmarks and keywords make searches easier. Passwords and encryption protect your entries, which can also be exported to Word, Rich Text or even HTML, one page at a time or the whole she-bang.

MacJournal - One of the Mac’s more popular journaling utilities is MacJournal. Everything’s in there except the kitchen sink.

Entries, video, audio, photos, images, PDFs, password and encryption. Search entries with a click, and synchronize data on MobileMe.

MacJournal even lets you blog online via Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, and MobileMe. And, speaking of mobile…

viJournal Lite - This is my favorite, and not just because it’s free. viJournal and viJournal Lite let you do a few things others don’t. Go mobile.

All these diary-cum-journal scrapbook wannabes do pretty much the same thing. They’re digital diaries. Or, journals, if you went to college. viJournal imports entries from viJournal Mobile on your iPhone. How cool is that?

You can record live video, encrypt files, add passwords, manage multiple journals, add photos to a daily image gallery, export in a variety of popular formats, post online, and more.

In the age of YouTube and iPhone it helps to have a way to gather events in photos and entries via your iPhone and get them published either online or in your journal with a click or two.

I don’t know how all this digital daily journal will pan out in another 20 years, but I heard it from everyone—mother, grandmother, great-grandmother—if your life is worth living, it’s worth recording a few details along the way. That’s what I’m doing. How about you?