Smart Diary

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 06, 2009

At first glance, Smart Diary seems similar to many other planners, with various calendar views and the ability to set tasks. What really sets Smart Diary apart is its diary feature, which is unlike anything we've seen before in this sort of program.

The program's interface is attractive and intuitive, with a surprisingly sleek calendar design. It's easy to do all the basics, like adding events and tasks, scheduling reminders, printing schedules, and so on. Everything is neatly arranged with tabs and drop-down menus, allowing users to quickly find the functions they want. What really impressed us about this program was the diary feature. It includes the main component of a diary--a block of space where users can input text and images--but also allows users to track certain "Life Factors," such as health, energy level, mood, and weather. Users who buy the program can customize their Life Factors. This allows users to track various components of their lives and analyze them over time, which is especially helpful for users who have medical conditions. The only thing that disappointed us about this feature was the graphs; we envisioned line graphs that would allow us to track the relationship between two or more factors over time, but all we got was some kind of hard-to-read bar graph that didn't make much sense. This is a pretty big drawback, but the program's other features still make it worthwhile.

Smart Diary is free, although upgrading gives users access to more options. It installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to all users.

 

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Publisher's Description

From Programming Sunrise:

Smart Diary is more than a simple Diary or a Personal Information Manager (PIM). You can plot your exercise program against your diary of health notes and see how they interact. Add information about changes in your diet and see how these changes have affected your health and activity levels. See how your mood is affected by your sleep. Track fatigue against dreams, diet or any part of your life that you choose. In addition to using informative graphs to show you how your choices affect your life, Smart Diary has all of the functions that you would expect to find in a professionally designed Personal Information Manager. Smart Diary's components work together to help you keep track of your life.

What's new in this version: Version 4.5.2 has added search to Schedule, a date range to the pie and gantt charts in Tasks, and it can choose to show tasks by their starting or ending date (or both) when using the calendar filter.

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