The Friendly Diary 3.1

The Friendly Diary is an application designed for those who want to keep a personal diary. It offers a user-friendly and safe environment where you can write about your days or scribble down your thoughts, experiences, memories, and anything you want to keep for yourself, exactly as you would do in a pen-and-paper diary. The application comes with a set of interesting features ranging from text formatting to options for creating backups for your diary.

When you first launch the app you will be asked to enter a name for your diary, which may be a username, and a password. This information will be required every time you want to access your diary, ensuring the privacy of your notes and besides, allowing different users to use the app in the same computer. Your diary entries will be stored in an encrypted file that can only be accessed with this password.

Once the initial setup is done, you will see that using the application is very easy. Diary entries are organized by date in a calendar to the left of the screen. Days which contain entries will be highlighted and you can navigate the calendar to browse entries from the past. As far as text input goes, the application works as a basic text editor; what you write is automatically saved as you type and text can be enhanced by applying bold, italics, as well as colors, and using different fonts, etc. You can also insert URLs, which is great because it makes it easy to add references from online sources. There is also a set of emoticons that you can choose to illustrate your mood in a particular day.

In addition, the application provides a bunch of extra tools: it includes a special calendar to keep birthdays and anniversaries, offers different skins to change the application appearance, and this new version also brings a spell checker. In the 'Tools' menu you will find options to export diary entries to Word and RTF files and create backups of your diary.

On the whole, I like how the application works; it is intuitive, straightforward, and most importantly, keeps your precious data safe from curious eyes. In my opinion, it just needs some work on the visual aspect. It would also be nice if you could add pictures to your diary entries. Nevertheless, The Friendly Diary is a simple solution for those who want to start capturing moments of their daily lives.