Membranophonist’s Ramblings

Let me preface this critique by saying that the developer, Dan Schimpf, has already improved this great application quite a bit since the last major release, giving me good reason to assume the application will continue to improve. None of the issues mentioned below are the sort that cause me great frustration when using the application - they are simply suggestions for improving the adherence to the Aqua HIG and consistency with other OS X applications.

• The toolbar options belong under a “View” menu. Toolbar visibility should be toggled using Command-Option-T, which fortunately doesn’t appear to be used by anything else in the application.
• Toggle Entries Drawer (Entry) and Toggle Journals Drawer (Journal) might be better placed in View or Window and should also have dynamic titles to reflect state.
• The Info Bar menu item should be dynamically titled and placed in the above suggested View menu.
• Both View sub-menus (of Entry and Journal) could be moved to the top level View menu (containing the toolbar/info bar toggle) as sub-menus labeled Journals and Entries, which would then contain the different view modes for the two drawers. The option selected in these menus, regardless of location, should have a check mark to their left (Apple’s guidelines for symbols in menus).
• The Check for Update item in the application menu should have ellipses dots, indicating that further interaction will be needed. Displaying the option to download the latest version when the user is already running it is somewhat odd. Informing up-to-date users that there are no updates available at present would be better (and might save on your bandwidth!).
• The Insert Link command (Entry) should also have ellipses dots for the same reason.
• If possible, differing icons for open and closed journal states would be nice for the Journals drawer.
• For the confirmation sheet that drops down when deleting a single journal entry, inserting the title of the entry in place of the “Delete 1 entry” would improve clarity. I don’t currently have any brilliant ideas about how to handle multiple simultaneous deletions.
• The box for entering Keywords should not have a default button since the Return key is used to delimit keywords.
  

  “Don’t use a default button if you use the Return key in text entry boxes. Having two behaviors for one key can confuse users and make the interface less predictable.”

• The Dock menu items should be available while the application is hidden.
• The Clean Up Text commands would be more logically placed under the Format menu.